Progressive Web App - Gimmick or Game-Changer

Progressive Web Apps are a new technique to provide native app-like experiences through a web site. Will PWAs overthrow other ways to publish native apps. Read on and find out...

But first, what's so great about PWAs and will they change the approach we make when we create apps or are they just a gimmick?

Code once, run everywhere

PWA's are just standard websites coded in HTML and JS, with specific metadata that tells the browser that the site is a PWA. PWA run on the default browser in full-screen and look just like a native app if coded well. Basic offline functionality can also be added to the web app through caching static files. So, in theory PWAs should run on practically any modern platform.

 

PWAs are also very fast, much faster than any standard website and run very efficiently. They could very well overthrow native apps. PWAs also take up much less space than a native app. A popular example would be Google Maps Go(375 KB) which is significantly smaller than the standard Google Maps(75 MB)

 

PWAs also show up on the home screen of the device, which provides a very engaging in

Run Everywhere?

Since, PWAs run on the browser, they should run on every device, but support from many browsers like Firefox and Safari have been lacking. Chrome has provided the maximum flexibility for PWAs, giving it all the features of any native app. While Safari has disabled push notifications for PWAs.

Conclusion

PWAs have a lot of advantages and can reduce costs by developing one webapp instead of developing multiple apps for each platform, but until we see better support to rival a native app

Thanks For Reading, 

TheBlogCrafter