Introduction To Progressive Web Applications

What are Progressive Web Applications?

    A web application that allows the user to work offline, provides a smooth and unobtrusive experience and allows the user to download an application that provides the same experience as provided in the browser, from the website itself, without the hassle of going to the app store, is said to be a Progressive Web Application. In a nutshell, a web application that satisfies the following can be said to be a Progressive Web Application. Although, Google has published a checklist for Progressive Web Applications ( link ), these are the bare minimum requirements that an app should fulfill so as to qualify as a Progressive Web Application (PWA).

• Web App Manifest
• Service Workers
• Icon
• Served over HTTPS ( SSL )

Why Progressive Web Applications?

    With high-speed internet becoming almost a part of our lives, we can all agree that how unreliable it can be. How good would it be if the applications that we use, can handle these fluctuations in network traffic gracefully, without breaking the flow of user experience? Following are the problems that we face with web and native applications.

• Internet Speed: Although we are used to having high-speed internet, the times when internet speed is too low for an application to work decently, the app performance goes down significantly and harms the user experience.
• Slow Loading Speeds : If a website or an app is too slow to load, chances are, that the user would not even wait for the application or website, and would switch to some alternative app or website. A study done by Google shows that the patience that an average user displays is around 3 seconds.
• Aversion towards native applications: People generally do not like to install native applications on their phones, when a web version is already available.
• Engagement: Users mostly spend 80% of their time on a select few native apps that they use. Mobile web sites do not receive the kind of attention and usage that a native app would garner. Thus, it becomes important that users are introduced to the app version of your website. Some websites, do this in a very ugly way. They usually prompt the user to download their native app. And the user is allowed to dismiss the prompt, in the best cases, the prompt stays on the web page as a sidebar in the bottom of the page, occupying almost 1/4th of the screen. Needless to say that such websites, lose their users as soon as they get them. Forcing the users to download native apps almost never works.

Progressive Web Applications solve these problems in a graceful way. Although PWA's have many benefits, but here are some major advantages

• Speed: PWA's are significantly faster than normal applications. From the moment they're installed, the app starts downloading data in the background and caches it on the phone. Thus reducing the time required to start the application and to begin interacting with it. Because of caching, the application doesn't need to access the network to fetch data.
• Immersive User Experience: PWA's work like a native application, push notifications and other functionalities that a regular app has. This creates the user experience immersive from the beginning.
• Reliable service: The working of PWA's is more reliable than that of normal applications, because of the use of service workers. A user can thus keep on using the application even if the network access is not available
• Engagement: As PWA's are capable of sending push notifications, it becomes able to engage the user in a phenomenal way, as the user can be notified of the processing of the application.