With battle lines clearly drawn between web applications and mobile applications, progressive web apps are seemingly the middle path that incorporates the best of both worlds.
PWAs have reaped benefits for the likes of Google, AliExpress and Flipkart who have reportedly seen 50-100 % increase in retention and conversion rates. Some of the benefits attributed to these apps include- superior user experience by smarter visitor engagements in real world scenarios.
Let us sample some ways in which Progressive web apps make a difference:
- Offline content facility – This is a key advantage. With the offline content capability, users will have access to content even in situations when there is no or poor internet connection. Increased availability translates to increased user engagement. Plus you can have custom pages instead of error notifications.
While not all business verticals benefit from this functionality, the likes of ecommerce and publishing companies benefit from this model as there is ability to browse the entire catalog.
Technically the content can be stored at multiple places. There are multiple options in HTML5 including webStorage, IndexedDB, webSQL. There is also the option of using browser offline storage like IndexedDB - Make once, deliver to all – The biggest advantage in terms of deployment is that what we get is a platform agnostic version of the app. Your reach is not limited to the platform that you support and your IT budget will not balloon in building native apps for all platforms. There is also no overhead of delivering separate updates for all platforms. Users can immediately enjoy the latest functionality. As a matter of fact the biggest benefit is that provides an option of agility to the business to deliver new features to users faster than ever.
- Sharing is easy – Yes, an underhand but unmistakable advantage is that you can actually share the link to an app you like. A simple feature that ensures the good word spreads organically.
- Better Performance – With a smartly designed PWA you can ensure that customers are not turned off by pages that are slow to load. Using tools like workers, application shells, and instant app pages, Progressive Web Apps provide can go faster. PWAs are documented to perform 50 to 100% faster than native apps in speed tests.
These are only some of the reasons why progressive web apps are the future. With several Javascript Frameworks readily available to be tweaked and used for development of PWAs, your business can start riding the PWA wave earlier than you think.
Whether it’s your existing website or mobile application we can help you evaluate your options to get PWA ready. Our UI/UX practice is trained on key JS frameworks like React and Angular.
