What is progressive web app ?
Let’ s first see the definition
PWA(Progressive web app) is a way to design the web applications, that gives the experience like native application(mobile application).
Before starting the detail discussion, one thing you must keep in mind that PWA(Progressive web app) is not any technology or tools, You will be developing web apps as you have been doing. This is just an approach to make your web application looks, feels and most important perform or even better like native mobile applications.
This article is subject to high level discussion of PWA, we are not going discuss any new technical terms here.
Why PWA is needed ?
These days developing web apps are not just designing the aesthetic layout, putting required content, serving to the user browser. When you design the product and serves through the web, therr require a lot of things to be taken care of to make the user experience better. For example if your web app take longer to reload the content, user needs to fill the same form again and again for a particular task like making payment, every time user visit the the same time same content are are downloaded. What if your target users have the slow internet connection. There might be many too.
Well, native applications solves many problem discussed, that’s why native app exists. But there are another problems with native apps. It is not possible for user to download each application in day to day life. There might be storage issue, application might not be compatible for some of the devices, user might not be interested to download that application, etc. In that case user always go to the mobile browser. Now if users land through browser, and does not get good experience using that web apps, he may quit the website, may not come again, may not make purchase. This makes low conversion rate, leads to low revenue.
Now here comes the PWA approach to make the web apps. Using this technique, web applications can be added(Installed) to the mobile devices without any data consumption. You must have seen ‘Add to home screen’ option on mobile browser, yes this is the one part of PWA approach. Once you add that it will be displayed on the home screen like any other mobile application. This makes the web apps installable.
Many assets like images, content can be stored so not download again until updated. This backs the offline supports like mobile applications or can perform better even in slow internet connection without any hassle.
“Experimentation and innovation is the way to keep the things in trend, PWA is one. Yes PWA is future of web.”
If you find this story helpful, please give a clap. Thanks
