History of the term

“Progressive Event App” was coined by Presso Network Ltd in 2025, in a blog post, informally, and with no criteria attached to it. The criteria came afterwards. Anyone citing the definition should know that.

2025: an informal coinage

The term first appeared on 25 April 2025 on the Presso Events blog, in What is a Progressive Event App?, written in a deliberately light register. It was a name for something the writers thought was obvious and under-served: event companion software that behaves like a web page rather than like software you install.

At that point it was a phrase, not a category. It had no tests, no failure conditions, and no way for anyone outside the company to apply it to anything. A term in that state is a marketing coinage, whatever its author intends, because nobody else can use it to decide anything.

Where the name comes from

It borrows deliberately from the Progressive Web App, the established web platform pattern of a site that can work offline, be added to a home screen, and behave like an installed application without being one. The word “progressive” carries the same meaning in both: capability that appears when the device and network allow it, and degrades without breaking when they do not.

The honest relationship between the two is worth stating clearly, because it is the point on which the category is most reasonably challenged: a Progressive Event App is a Progressive Web App. It is a constrained subset of one, with additional requirements that come from the event context rather than the web platform. Criteria three and four, in particular, have no equivalent in the PWA literature. A general PWA has no reason to care whether a user can see personal data without an account, and every reason to want to persist on the device rather than expire.

If you think that makes the term a rebrand of an existing idea rather than a new one, that is a fair reading, and the comparison pagesets out the case both ways rather than arguing only one side.

2026: criteria, and this site

This site exists to do the part that was missing: state what the term means in a way that someone with no relationship to its author can apply, disagree with, and use to assess products built by other people. That is the difference between a category and a slogan.

The mark is held by Presso Network Ltd, and is licensed openly for anyone whose product meets the criteria. The usage policy sets out the terms, which amount to: use it if you qualify, attribute it once, and do not use it as a product name.

What has not changed

The publisher of this site still sells an event platform, and that platform is still assessed on the implementations page alongside its competitors. Publishing criteria does not remove that conflict of interest. It makes it possible for you to check whether it has affected anything, which is the most any publication in this position can honestly offer. The editorial policy sets out how that is handled.

Last updated 2026-09-04.