PWA Development
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Wondering if PWAs are good for your project? Here's all you need to know to make an informed decision.
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A lot of companies already switched their mobile websites to PWAs and the results are mind-blowing.
Seems like Progressive Web Apps are a fast track to success. But is that so for every business?
Time to break that topic into simple factors. Explore when PWAs are a good choice and when it’s better to choose another way.
Progressive Web Apps use the features of modern browsers to offer functionalities that are traditionally associated with native apps. They combine features of mobile apps with accessibility and ease of use of a website.
PWAs help you to expand your reach, build relations, increase conversions, and appear in new markets.
Great performance, easy installation, accessibility offline, and low data consumption.
Issues on iOS and with legacy devices.
A PWA means lower cost but possible iOS issues and not every feature you want may be available.
A native app means higher cost but better performance.
Ali Hackett from Mobify estimated that companies will see a 20 percent boost in revenue thanks to PWAs.
Progressive Web Apps belong to a new generation of web applications. They load like regular websites but take advantage of features like service workers or web app manifests to offer functionalities that traditionally belong to native apps (like push notifications).
They combine the features of mobile apps with the accessibility, discoverability, and ease of use that have been the foundation of the modern Internet.
“Progressive Web Apps use modern web capabilities to deliver an app-like user experience. They evolve from pages in browser tabs to immersive, top-level apps, maintaining the web’s low friction at every moment.” – Google
PWAs allows developers to bring mobile experience to the web. They provide smoother navigation, fast loading time, can be used offline, and pinned to the home screen to be used like mobile apps.
PWAs aren’t limited to specific frameworks and can be built with any framework or none at all.
How do Progressive Web Apps support business success?
1. You reach potential customers easily.
Progressive Web Apps work online as websites. It means you can easily apply various marketing and advertising techniques (including SEO) to build your reach and brand at a lower cost.
2. PWAs allow you to overcome the obstacles that prevent users from downloading the app.
PWAs don’t use much storage, and that’s one of the common reasons users don’t want to download apps or uninstall them. PWAs don’t have to be downloaded from the app store. They are installed directly from a mobile website, and they encourage users to download them.
3. You get a powerful tool to build relations and increase conversions.
PWAs give you the power to engage your users. After installing, they can send push notifications. That’s a powerful tool to increase engagement and conversions, build relations with the audience, as well as to remind them about your brand and support customer retention.
4. You can reach new markets.
The fact that PWAs work offline allows you to expand your reach to more markets, where the internet connection is not stable. Plus, that means reliability.
As a consequence of reliability, accessibility, and experience, you get more customers and your conversion rates improve.
The responsive web design approach allows web developers to display websites well on devices with small and large screens without the need to maintain a mobile-specific version of the website.
But the problem is that it doesn’t go far enough to fit the whole variety of devices and screens. It doesn’t use progressive enhancements to deliver native features when viewed on any device. Progressive Web Apps solve this problem through their use of service workers.
iOS didn’t support PWAs for a long time. Fortunately, that changed. Plus, with iOS 13 many bugs were fixed. However, Safari doesn’t provide an installation prompt from within the app.
One of the best success stories connected to Progressive Web App development is the AliExpress case. The company struggled to convince users to download their mobile app – they preferred to purchase on the website. Therefore AliExpress decided to use the broad reach of their website and build a PWA. Conversion rates for new users increased by 104%.
Housing.com has a similar story: a PWA helped them to increase conversion rates by 38% and visitors started to return more often.
Based on her industry experience, Ali Hackett from Mobify estimated that companies will see a 20 percent boost in revenue thanks to PWAs and delivering faster, more app-like experiences with them.
Mobile presence is a must for anyone who wishes to be noticed but developing and maintaining both website and mobile apps for Android and iOS is often a struggle. PWAs solve that problem: you develop only one app.
Reliability, accessibility, and excellent experience is what users want. Combining it with low storage use, means you answer fundamental users’ needs.
PWAs seem to be a perfect solution for e-commerce, thanks to offline availability and fast experience.
However, if a large part of your audience uses iOS, analyze which features your app needs and check if a PWA can provide that. If not, consider hybrid or native app development.
Proceed to the next chapters of this handbook to explore differences between native apps and PWAs in more detail, and learn more about the features of PWAs.
Plus, new content is coming soon. We’ll be talking about frameworks that can be used for PWA development and the business benefits that come from push notifications. Sign up for updates on the left.
