PROGRESSIVE WEB APPS

Progressive Web Apps — the future of mobile?

PWAs — The mobile app technology of the future. But, what are they? How do they work? And how can I convert my website into one?

Progressive Web Apps (PWA’s) are becoming more widespread every day and when you see their benefits it’s easy to understand why.

PWA’s are proven to bring about higher customer engagement, higher customer retention, and increased conversion rates to your web app.

So, what are PWA’s?

To put it simply, PWA’s are basically phone and desktop apps that are built with web technologies and downloaded through the browser.

This is crazy powerful.

Think about it: You no longer will have to deal with app store approvals, separate code-bases, different deployment methods and everything else that comes along with native apps.

Instead, you build a PWA once using web technologies and deploy it to the web. This might look a little something like Starbuck’s PWA:

If you notice, both of these things are actually the same app. The difference is that one is a website that is accessed through a browser, and the other is a PWA which, once downloaded, the user will access just like they access any other app or desktop application.

How is a PWA different from a native mobile app?

PWA’s are different from native mobile apps because they never go through an app store. PWA’s are “downloaded” directly from a website and the contents of the app basically is just the contents of that website except it’s not within a browser, but rather is a standalone experience.

Native apps take a lot of development time to create. If you want to build a native app for android and iOS that will take 2 development frameworks, 2 programming languages, 2 deployment pipelines etc.