Most PWA tutorials get you to a Lighthouse score of 100 and call it a day. That's fine for a demo, but production is different. Users install your app, kill it, come back three days later expecting fresh data, and get a stale cache from 2023. Push notifications don't arrive. The install prompt never fires. The offline page is a blank white screen.

This article is about the decisions that matter after you've read the intro docs — the ones you only encounter when real users are actually using the thing.

The Manifest Is More Than a Checklist

Every PWA guide tells you to create a manifest.json .…