You might be using few Progressive Web Apps daily but you never realized it. But PWA is going to sky-rocket in the future.
Everyone is addicted to smartphones now. We are burdened with so many apps, some of which we rarely use. But why do we need to download a native app in the first place?
Because I will never want this experience on my mobile browser.
But then we saw some websites that looked fine on the mobile browser. Ask a developer the pain it took to adjust stylings according to the screen size. And yet it missed out many app-like features.
Today we have something known as Progressive Web Apps. What the heck is that?
Simply put, a combination of web pages and an app.
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Few Reasons Why Progressive Web Apps Are So Amazing
- Great user interaction and no janky scrolling makes it engaging just like an app. Moving through pages is much faster than traditional mobile websites.
- No need for lengthy downloads from the play store. Give some space to your mobile storage.
- Developers can send push notifications to engage the users. Don’t worry, visitors won’t miss any updates on the upcoming discount on your purchases.
- No need for developers to hand off big chunks of money to Google and Apple. PWAs don’t need a separate codebase for different mobile platforms, and thus a low cost of maintainability.
- Stop worrying about slow network connections. PWAs adjust according to internet speed.
- No need to install updates. They are always up-to-date.
- Just add them to your home screen and enjoy an app-like experience.
- Easily share links with your friends. The social power of URLs matter.
- Capable of full-screen experience.
- Splash screens and theme color for the address bar - you soon realize as a developer that you have entire control over the whole mobile screen!
- Offline access - PWA apps use a script called service worker which runs in the background, and you can trigger them for serving some content when users are offline or instant loading of pages when the user repeatedly visits a particular web page.
- When Google announced the mobile-first indexing of its pages; PWAs will be very fruitful for the SEO of the site.
Few Great Examples That Show The Power of PWAs –
- Paper Planes  – This is a kind of PWA. You stamp the date, make a plane and literally ‘throw your plane’ around the world.
- Book my Show  – Launching a PWA drove an exponential 80% increase in ticket purchases. Earlier users were reluctant to download heavy size apps and on mobile sites load speed and user experience were not optimal.
- Flipkart  - A PWA implementation brought them exciting results like 3x more time spent and more active users through ‘Add to Home Screen’.
Now comes the question - Will PWAs completely replace your Android and iOS apps?
Yes, but not completely. Still, they have limited capabilities when it comes to integrating with smartphone hardware like Bluetooth, fingerprint sensors, etc. And providing a more familiar user experience. But these are minor problems that will be solved in future years to come and are not a real blockage to the rise of web apps.
To summarize:
“Progressive Web Apps are just websites that took all the right vitamins”
Guest Post By: Aayush Agarwal
