A progressive web app (PWA) is a website that looks and behaves as it is a mobile app. PWA’s are built to fake advantage of native mobile device features,without requiring the end user to visit an app store,make a purchase and download software locally instead ,a PWA can be located with a search query and accessed immediately through a browser.
The goal of PWA’s is to blur the distinction between native apps and the mobile web by bringing most of the benefits of native mobile apps to the mobile browser. PWA’s use standards based technologies and run in a container that is secure and accessible to anyone on the web. They can send web push notifications,wok offline and be accessible from the home screen,just like a mobile app from an app store.
Building a native apps? PWA? making the right choice makes all the difference
Advantage over Native and Hybrid app:
1. Cost of development and distribution:
One of the top reasons why companies build web applications or hybrid applications over native applications is cost.By targeting the web they are able to build one application that woks for all platforms.
2. Network resilience:
With the introduction of service worker web applications finally have a way of controlling network access themselves.This means that web app developers can decide which assets to cache and how to deal with slow or disconnected network situations in their specific application.
3. Device API access:
Native and Hybrid apps have given developers much more access to the device hardware than web apps have had while this is still the case for some hardware the web has come to a long way. Thee are now ways of accessing 30 acceleration, accelerometer position, camera and all kinds of other device API’s. You can find a good overview of API’s being worked on at MDN.
4. Poor Conversion and friction:
Both native applications and hybrid applications are distributed mainly through centralized application stores. This means that user’s either need to find your application through the store-which is unlikely if you are not in the top 20 or so apps in a given category- or that you need to convince them to install your application after they find you on the web.
