Betting on Angular + PWA Instead of Native Apps

GrooveShouter needed to work in one of the worst environments imaginable for software: a dark, loud club, on someone else's phone, over patchy wifi. Building and maintaining separate native apps for that use case, alone, was simply too much. So I put all my chips on Angular combined with Progressive Web Apps.

It worked surprisingly well. Guests could scan a QR code and be in the app instantly, no App Store friction at all. The rough edge was the PWA update mechanism — service workers caching stale versions at exactly the wrong moment during a live event — but that turned out to be a solvable problem rather than a fundamental one, and I got it under control fairly quickly.