Origins of PWAs

[00:00:00]
>> Maximiliano Firtman: That's Steve Jobs in WWDC,07. I remember watching that live stream when he, that was, I think, a couple of months after he presented the first iPhone, and he was about to present the iPhone, SDK. So how to create app for the iPhone, okay? So let's listen to Steve.

[00:00:23]
>> Steve Jobs: Now, what about developers?
>> Audience: [APPLAUSE]
>> Steve Jobs: What about developers?
>> Audience: [APPLAUSE]
>> Steve Jobs: We have been trying to come up with a solution to expand the capabilities of iPhone by letting developers write great apps for it. And yet, keep the iPhone reliable and secure, and we've come up with a very sweet solution.

[00:00:49]
We've got an innovative new way to create applications for mobile devices, really innovative, and it's all based on the fact that iPhone has the full Safari inside. The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. And it gives us tremendous capability, more than has ever been in a mobile device to this date.

[00:01:17]
And so, you can write amazing web 2.0 and Ajax apps, that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. They can make a call, they can send an email, they can look up an location on Google maps.

[00:01:44]
>> Steve Jobs: After you write them, you have instant distribution, you don't have to worry about distribution. Just put them on your internet server, and they're really easy to update. Just change the code on your own server, rather than having to go through this really complex update process. And they're secure with the same kind of security you'd use for transactions with Amazon or a bank, and they run securely on the iPhone so they don't compromise its reliability or security.

[00:02:18]
And guess what? There's no SDK that you need, you've got everything you need, if you know how to write apps using the most modern web standards to write amazing apps for the iPhone today.
>> Maximiliano Firtman: Yeah, well, Steve is right. Actually, he was presenting pressive web apps, and actually in a pretty good way.

[00:02:41]
He was using different terms, okay, because we are talking about almost 20 years that has passed in, [LAUGH] that almost incredible but web 2.0 Ajax. But it's just, he was just talking about vanilla JavaScript using just the Fetch API, using the cloud, and that's all. Actually, that doesn't mean that Apple created PWS.

[00:03:03]
Well, not the term, we mentioned that the term, the term was actually was coined by a Google engineer, actually 10 years after. But, actually no, we can't say that Apple was the first one that made that big push initially. But before that, we had also web app for Symbian, for Blackberry, there were other mobile operating systems.

[00:03:27]
I made a lot of web apps for those platforms and they were not called PWAs, they were mobile widgets, different names. And actually the first one, the first platform that it's a kind of similar of what we're going to do today was created by Microsoft in 1999. It was called MTAs.

[00:03:50]
MTA was Microsoft HTML applications, something like that. And it was actually a way to take HTML and package that HTML as a window app, okay? Kind of something that we do these days with electron, okay? Kind of that, so it's not new, okay? But actually it's an old ideal, it's not a new idea.