As the market grows online, it becomes crucial for business owners to make their products and services reach their customers faster. It becomes possible when businesses are ready to build their progressive web app, which offers several benefits like faster, user-friendly loading time, and the development cost is comparatively less. Progressive web apps are much more effective and efficient than native apps.
Today, we will be discussing progressive web applications, how these apps differ from native apps, and how they can benefit your business.
What is Progressive Web App?
Progressive web apps are applications designed with primary programming languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. These apps are supported by a modern web browser and help developers build web apps that look similar to native apps.
What Makes Progressive Web Apps Different from Native Apps?
As the online market grows rapidly, businesses are concerned about their growth. Every company wants to improve its customer experience to boost their sale. After the COVID-19 pandemic, mobile technology and app development growth has increased. Every business wants to capitalize on its online presence. Hence, industries like e-commerce, health, e-learning, and social networks turned to PWAs, which helped increase their customer reach while keeping the development costs low. PWA Developer makes these applications run on a web browser and ensure that these web app should run on both Android and iOS.
Without any doubt, PWAs are the future of every business as they can make vast amounts of data available that is accessible offline, ensuring a seamless user experience.
Native apps need to be developed separately for Android and iOS. Thus, developing the same app idea for two different platforms becomes expensive, but developers ensure that the app developed should work well on all devices. On the other hand, PWAs are considerably cheaper, work with a single code, and Progressive Web App Development Company develops these apps faster than others. But, when it comes to speed and compatibility both at the same time, native apps stand at the top of the notch.
Native apps are developed with the help of a specific programming language and used for some specific platforms, due to which the cost goes high. Businesses may go for native and PWA both. It is the call of business which kind of app they want to develop for their customers.
Benefits of Building a Progressive Web Application for Your Business
Still confused, which one suits best for your business?
Here are some benefits that may help you choose and make the right decision for an app.
1) Data Usage & Storage
When anyone talks about native apps, the user needs to open the play store, search for the app, download the app, and give all the necessary permissions required to run the app. Hence it consumes more data storage and usage.
But if we talk about the progressive web apps, users need to open the browser and search for the same. These apps are just like websites, and everything loads on the spot. Data usage and storage become no issue for users, and as a result, they become more familiar with PWAs.
2) Offline Availability
Offline navigation or offline availability is one of the strong desires of every user working online. There are certain times when data fluctuates, and users fear losing their data. Progressive web apps come with offline availability features, where users can access data offline.
3) Great Performance
Web scripts that run separately and do not affect the web page. Apart from that, all the data are prefetch, enabling faster and more seamless navigation. As the script doesn’t run on the page, they don’t contribute to page load times. One of the advantages that PWAs provide is that you can directly add PWA to your home screen and load your web app without adding any other resource.
4) Platform & Device Agnostic
Progressive Web App Development Company is responsible for developing web apps compatible with every platform. These apps should not get lagged while used by the user. The primary goal of a progressive web app should be the look, how it feels, and whether it is supporting our finance. Companies like Starbucks, TikTok, Twitter, and many more use PWAs as these businesses find it more convenient and cost-effective. Several issues have been solved as modern browsers ensure that the web app fits and runs on any device without any error.
5) Development Cost Becomes Cheaper
As progressive web apps use common programming languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, the development cost becomes comparatively cheaper than a native app. Talking PWA developers online is highly skilled and experienced in web technologies as these have been in the market longer.
6) Perform Like Native Apps
Progressive Web Apps are similar to native apps. The design, buttons, box, and fonts look similar to native apps. Users don’t have to make an account or install anything. PWAs can interact with the system too. Sharing files, audio recording, push notifications, and fetching geolocations are some of the interactions performed by system and PWAs.
7) No Third-Party App Distribution Required
When the app is ready to publish, a specific publishing platform charges an additional cost to get your app published. A particular publishing platform requires additional validation and authentication before your app finally gets published for the user. These processes add extra time and cost for your app to get published for the users.
But, when dealing with progressive web apps, the app gets instant live, and users can use the app as long they have some web browsers like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. Thus when talking about PWAs, there is no third-party app distribution required.
Few Examples Of Successful Progressive Web Apps
In the current market, there are plenty of apps available both in native and PWAs. Today we will be discussing certain apps that set an excellent example of PWA like:
1) Pinterest: When Pinterest officially released its app, no one would be interested in downloading its native app. Instead, they were flexible in using their progressive web app as it was fast and reliable. Their expert to their internal data that only 1% of the user downloaded the app.
The user who downloaded the app quickly uninstall it because of space consumption, data consumption, and many more. The user engagement was more in PWA as compared to their native app.
2) Twitter: In the initial days when Twitter launched, it had to struggle a lot. The majority of the users complained about longer loading time, and the application was not responsive. Rectifying the common issue faced by the user, Twitter launched their Twitter Lite app based on PWA. PWA is lightweight, responsible, and user-friendly.
3) TikTok: Though tiktok was light app, they launched their PWA. Their aim was not to grab user attention or get reach in the social media market. Instead, they tend to use the light form of the web to cut off their cost and get into the fast-forward development process of PWAs.
4) Uber: When the Uber app was launched, many users had 2G connections which led to massive data consumption, loading time, and less responsiveness. Having a bad experience, Uber lost many customers.
Finally, Uber launched their PWA version, where users had a great experience. Even users with 2G connections used the app, which helped Uber return to the Indian market. The first version of PWA was rolled out in the year 2017.
5) Starbucks: Starbucks is one of the famous brands. The web app of Starbucks is more responsive, has a faster loading time, and has a customized user experience.
With PWA’s help, various features implement according to users’ demands, like checking order prices, checking nutrients value, and browsing their menu. All these be checked in offline mode too.
6) Facebook: Facebook is one of the famous social media platforms. There are millions of users on Facebook. It becomes difficult for users to use the app when there is a data fluctuation, lag in-app, and many other problems.
Thus, many users prefer to use the web or lite version of the Facebook app as it is fast, reliable, and lag-free. Today we see that most of the users use the PWA version of Facebook.
Other native apps have their PWA version to help users get the best experience from the web app. From the business point of view, it is cost-effective and reliable, and from the user’s point of view, it is fast and user-friendly.
Final Talk
We talk about managing data-efficient, providing offline capabilities, making the app cost-effective, giving offline ability, high performance, and multiple platform support.
Making data storage usage low, all these factors are possible with a one-way solution, i.e., developing PWA for your business.
For every business coming online, PWAs are the best solution for them that can help them reach their target audience in less time, and these businesses can have a good hold in the online market. In the coming years, we can see new businesses coming up with PWAs.
