A Survey on Progressive Web Applications for Decentralized Systems
Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) have emerged as a transformative paradigm in modern software engineering, combining the reach of the web with the capabilities of native applications. Simulta- neously, decentralized systems—anchored by blockchain technology, distributed ledger frameworks, and peer-to-peer networking protocols—are reshaping trust architectures across industries ranging from finance and healthcare to supply chain and digital identity. Despite the clear synergies between these two technological pillars, the intersection of PWAs and decentralized systems remains relatively underexplored in the academic literature. This survey addresses that gap by systematically reviewing and analyzing the convergence of PWA design principles with decentralized infrastructure paradigms. We examine how service workers, Web App Manifests, push notifications, and IndexedDB offline storage can be effectively integrated with blockchain nodes, smart contracts, IPFS-based content stor- age, and decentralized identity (DID) frameworks to produce resilient, censorship-resistant, and user- centric applications. We survey thirteen seminal works spanning cross-platform application devel- opment, blockchain architecture, decentralized identity management, IoT integration, and distributed application (DApp) design. Our analysis reveals recurring challenges including transaction latency, key management complexity, offline consistency under Byzantine fault conditions, and the tension between decentralization purity and user experience expectations. We further synthesize findings through a structured comparative analysis across six dimensions: focus area, PWA feature utilization, blockchain integration depth, reported performance metrics, and identified limitations. Based on this synthesis, we identify open research directions and propose guidelines for practitioners seeking to build production-grade PWA-based DApp frontends. This survey contributes a consolidated reference for researchers and engineers working at the intersection of web engineering and decentralized computing.
