PWA technical requirements

At a minimum, there are three core technical requirements to be a PWA. A website must have a web manifest file, be served using HTTPS, and must register a service worker with a fetch event handler. You will dive deeper into each one of these requirements in future chapters.

The web manifest drives the Add to Homescreen experience. HTTPS provides a layer of security and trust between your application and the browser. The service worker provides the extensible backbone for event-driven functionality to execute on a separate thread from the user interface.

A PWA should also use an application shell or common HTML and CSS. This is the most common application of Chrome, which is used on just about every page on the site. If you have any experience with single page applications, you should understand what an application shell is.