Why Progressive Web Apps Are Outperforming Native Mobile Apps
Be it the Apple’s app store or the Google’s play store – there is a wide range of applications available on both the platforms. You can find applications which remind you to drink water any specific number of times a day to the ones which help you calculate the compound interest accurately which you have to pay on your car loan. The number of mobile apps available is constantly growing. In the year 2013 the number of apps in the Google Play Store was surpassed 1 million and presently it is more than 2.9 million.
Mobile apps have become so important in our lives that we have run out of space on our phones, even when some of the apps are left to be downloaded. But now you have the solution. Do you have a lot of apps which you can download without worrying much about the space? Yes, they are called the Progressive Web Apps!
What Are Progressive Web Apps?
In the simplest words – a progressive web app is a kind of mobile app which is delivered via the web.
It works like any native app, it also uses an application shell which allows for app-style navigation and gestures. Then what makes it the progressive apps so different from the native apps?
The major difference is that they don’t need to be downloaded from the app store. It runs, just self-reliant, right in a web browser. Some of the progressive web application with the help from the social workers are able to load instantly, even when there is low connectivity. Also, with pre-caching, the application remains updated all the time which displays the most recent version whenever it opened.
How Does It Work?
The smooth working of the Progressive web apps is there because it uses JavaScript to make the experience for its users. The necessary resources are only loaded when the user clicks on the icon and interacts with the app. It is the JavaScript code enables the PWA the ability to work offline + helps to load the PWA much faster than the native applications.
But why isn’t progressive web apps a mainstream one yet?
Well, the concept, as well as this amazing technology, have been in news since 2005. The problem is that the improvements took place in recent times in the scripting languages like HTML5 made it a very easy task to build or convert websites to a progressive web app. Since those improvements, it has started becoming a favourite of the designers and developers now.
Why Progressive Web Apps?
Well, like every piece of technology, native applications also have their own advantages. But here we are talking about PWA & what wall gives them an edge over them all.
So when it comes to the native apps, a developer has to develop three different versions of the same app- for iOS, Android and Windows. But that is not the case with the progressive web apps, here they just have to build one version.
Another massive hurdle for the native apps is the app install friction. It takes a minimum of 6 clicks for any user to install a native app. Studies show that with each click, they lose around 20% users.
Apparently, downloading a native app is far harder than deciding to download a web app.
Besides all this, there are many more advantages with progressive web apps have to offer-
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Short Development Lead Time
The developers only need to develop one single platform-agnostic version of the application. The best thing about that is – this single version can easily be accessed by any end user irrespective of the operating system or gadget they are using.
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Discoverability
Most of the native apps on our phones have their own search feature. When we look for results from more than a single application, and for that we have to go to every single application to search. Native apps cannot be crawled by search engines. On the other hand, progressive web apps can be. Now, one can easily go about searching anything on Google and fetch the results from the content inside the progressive application, without leaving the app.
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Quick and simple updates
Another best thing about the PWS is progressive web apps will keep all the apps concurrently updated every time any change is made. This is because the play store does not have any applications which can be installed and updated every time changes are made to the services. Because of this, the user can easily enjoy a number of benefits from the latest updates without having to download the application again-
- Features
- Functionalities
- Security Updates
With the progressive web application approach, we can check the highly terminal issues as well. Issues like fragmentation of software which many times forces organizations to prolong the legacy support for the older versions (or risk chopping off the sections of the end-user base till its update is initiated) can also be checked.
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Web Push Notifications
Well, the Native apps are not the only applications ones which send push notifications. Today, even the progressive web apps support the push notifications API + also supporting the browser push notifications. The Bowser or web push notification appears as the small clickable pop-ups which appear on the mobile or the web browser which the user is online.
These notifications are sent via the website instead of any specific application. Another reason why the Progressive Web Apps have their own appeal is – if the user reads anything on a progressive web app, it can always find an alternative to build a mobile app too.
Numerous major brands have started shifting from native applications to progressive web apps, and it’s very easy to say why now. Hence we can say that both the native applications and mobile websites offer several advantages or disadvantages. When compared, the progressive web applications are proving out to be the best of both the worlds for the organizations. Bigger and better things await as Progressive web apps technology continues to develop.