PWA – the future of mobile development?

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Source: https://medium.com/tecnolog%C3%ADa/what-is-a-pwa-and-how-to-create-one-5e4c182682bd

Introduction       

When you saw the title of this article, you probably started thinking about what PWA means. I am not surprised because it is not a widely present concept. However, it is worthy of being familiar with the idea due to its potential to shift the mobile applications market. PWA stands for Progressive Web Applications, and it relates to applications that we can use through an internet browser instead of downloading them on our phones or tablets.

Advantages

Referring to my sources, PWAs have several adavnatages over native apps. I want to mention the most significant in my opinion:

  1. You do not have to download it and, as a result to wait until an app is installed
  2. There is no necessity to contact Google Play or App Store to tweak or change your application.
  3. PWAs are independent of the operating system

Potential   

According to Comscore research monthly a half of smartphone users do not download any new app. It illustrates that it is really difficult to convince a prospective customer to download an app before using your services nowadays. Apart from these statistics, several success stories prove that PWAs work out in everyday business.  Here you have some of them.

  1. By developing a PWA, Tinder managed to reduce the loading time from 11.91 seconds to 4.68 seconds.
  2. Trivago witnessed an upsurge in adding its progressive web application to the home screen by 150% and 97% more click-outs to hotel offers.
  3. Twitter managed to achieve 75% more tweets accompanied by slashing the size of its app to only 3%.
Trivago PWA

A possible danger

Apple and Google, which currently are in a monopolistic position regarding the distribution of mobile apps, will be reluctant to lose the money that they derive from this channel. Primarily, it relates to Appel, which takes 30% of the price of each sold app in their marketplace. I should also mention that Safari does not keep up with most novelties in web development, so as a result, Apple can lose twice.

Summary

In my opinion, WPAs will be on the rise in the upcoming years. The most significant factors that convinced me to this statement are the record of success stories and lower development costs thanks to their cross-platform nature.

Sources:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/progressive-web-apps-chromium/

https://www.iqvis.com/blog/progressive-web-app-development/

https://web.dev/what-are-pwas/

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2 thoughts on “PWA – the future of mobile development?

  1. 45276-EX says:

    Interesting perspective on this technology. I am only hesitant to agree as most downloaded applications have higher functionality, easier to use, looks more appealing, etc., than a normal browser version of the same brand or business model. That being said, I can agree that PWA will be on the rise as these issues may eventually diminish bringing the browser and application versions closer together and reducing differences.

  2. 46444 says:

    PWA is an in interesting technology, however it doesn’t provide as many features as native languages and SDKs for iOS or Android as it’s just a tool to run JS code using WebViews. (almost the same as opening a browser but under different application name and logo). Security is quite weak as it’s hard to keep data encrypted because you don’t have access to native frameworks and DBs. On the other hand, if your aim is to create MVP for investments and you don’t have time or money to spend on native development PWA comes in really handy

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