Show explainer message to users on production app reload due to update

[graemian]

Hi,

I have a webapp that a few users have installed as home screen shortcuts. When they open the app after I’ve release a new version, the previously loaded app displays, then reconnects to the server and reloads the page to do the version upgrade. This often happens just as the user starts to do something in the app.

This is a pretty bad user experience. The user doesn’t know the reason for the reload, so they may even assume the app is buggy.

Ideally I’d like to display a message that says the app must reload due to a version upgrade, but I’d settle for a post-upgrade message that explains what happened also.

How can I go about displaying such messages?

Thanks!

[rjdavid]

Allowing users to trigger hot reload when they're ready

The hot reload feature is great but causes some of us to lose work when it happens unexpectedly. During testing we’d be in the middle of creating/editing something, and the browser would reload. This post aims to do two things: See if the approach I’ve done is sound (if above is true) Share the approach for others to use as well in their apps. The idea is to notify users who are in the app that an update is ready. I’ve seen mentions of how to do this so I put things together in a simple way t…