What are PWA Apps

Many say that PWAs will be the new standard in the future of the app world, and it looks like it's actually happening! Thanks to the emerging tech giants, Progressive Web Applications has become an amazing technology.

What is PWA?

Progressive Web App is a relatively new concept in the mobile and web world. PWAs are developed using specific technologies and approaches to create applications that take advantage of both native and web applications. Basically, it's a mixture of mobile and web applications.

Using the concept of progressive enhancement, these apps work no matter what browser you're using. Progressive Web Applications give users a great experience on any modern smart device - phone, tablet, PC. Even though they are "just" web apps, PWAs work in a similar way to native apps (with some limitations, of course).

The distinguishing feature of PWAs is their dissimilarity with other conventional web applications. PWA has access to your smartphone's internals, so for example, sensors such as GPS can be used to find your location, accelerators or a camera (even with advanced controls!) and more. The PWA concept as a whole makes it easier for users to interact with content.

During the Google I/O 2017 PWA presentation, it was mentioned that while web apps on mobile devices have almost 3x more unique users compared to native apps. Native 20 times more attractive than web apps. It can be concluded that Progressive Web Apps is a perfect technology that combines these two types of applications for the convenience of users. For the best experience, we recommend that you open the PWA on your PC. Even if you only have a browser open, the web app behaves just like a native app. It accesses your location, accelerometers and runs in full screen mode, giving you the ability to work with applications.

Why is PWA the future of mobile apps?

Most Progressive Web App data is saved to device storage when it first starts. The next time the user wants to use it, the app will download some data. This is a surprisingly useful feature for people with poor connectivity, especially in emerging markets in many countries around the world, such as India. Developers Uber and Twitter have reported that their PWAs work great on a normal 2G connection.

• Multiplatform

Because PWAs run in the browser, they can work across multiple platforms. This is a great feature that allows businesses to reach a wider audience, no matter what device they use. Your users will have the same experience across all the devices they use. Also, once you've finished developing an app, you don't have to create others for each platform. So you're probably thinking right now that Progressive Web Applications are just web apps that work like native apps. And in fact - it's right! Web developers can easily develop familiar applications using technologies they already know. We're talking about HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, even JS frameworks. Vue, React and Angular which have PWA support. There is no need to learn Java and Kotlin for Android, Objective-C and Swift for iOS, and even C# for Windows development. This solution is much easier than hiring additional staff to develop your own applications.

• User engagement

PWA can help you improve conversions for new users. The app is more reliable than just a website and allows you to send push notifications to your users even after the app is closed. Once it's saved to the device, it takes much less time to respond than a normal website that has to fetch and download everything again.

• Security

Finally, with Progressive Web Applications, you don't have to worry about the security of your application - they are served over HTTPS. This encryption ensures that your app stays safe and sound.

PWAs are essentially apps that behave like native apps in some way. What does it mean? The development process for a PWA is very similar to a typical web application. Of course, there are some requirements that must be met, but fear not. The internet is full of online tools to help you and make PWA development easy. Judah Gabriel Himango in his blog briefly explained the whole process of converting and publishing a web application as a PWA on three main platforms - iOS, Android and Windows. He mentioned a very interesting tool called PWABuilder that can convert a web application to PWA, give developers some advice on what is missing in their application, and even bring back publish-ready packages for major platforms. Many say that PWAs will the new standard in the future world of mobile apps, and it's probably true! Thanks to progressive tech giants, Progressive Web Applications has become an amazing technology.