Progressive Web Apps
Progressive Web Apps are user experiences that have the reach of the web, and are:
Ø Reliable — Load instantly and never show the dinosaur, even in uncertain network conditions.
Ø Fast — Respond quickly to user interactions with silky smooth animations and no janky scrolling.
Ø Engaging — Feel like a natural app on the device, with an immersive user experience
Reliable
When launched from the user’s home screen, service workers enable a Progressive Web App to load instantly, regardless of the network state.
A service worker, written in JavaScript, is like a client-side proxy and puts you in control of the cache and how to respond to resource requests. By per-caching key resources, you can eliminate the dependence on the network, ensuring an instant and reliable experience for your users.
Fast
53% of users will abandon a site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load! And once loaded, users expect them to be fast — no janky scrolling or slow-to-respond interfaces.
Engaging
Progressive Web Apps are installable and live on the user’s home screen, without the need for an app store. They offer an immersive full screen experience with help from a web app manifest file and can even re-engage users with web push notifications.
The Web App Manifest allows you to control how your app appears and how it’s launched. You can specify home screen icons, the page to load when the app is launched, screen orientation, and even whether or not to show the browser chrome.
PWA — Is it really Good?
On one hand, we have native apps that are undoubtedly fast and efficient in most of the cases. On the other hand, there are websites that are kind of slow and with the connectivity issues, it only gets worse.
Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP) spearheaded by Twitter and Google was launched in 2016 to solve those slow connection issues only. PWAs work flawlessly in all the possible scenarios. With a good connection, there is never a problem. The problem is when we have no connection and we are greeted with the error page.
But this can become most annoying if we have a slow connection. The page seems to be loading and all we see is a blank screen. We just wait, wait and wait but the page never seems to load. This is where PWA comes to our rescue. The best part about PWAs — you get the best user experience possible in slow connectivity as well as no connectivity (yep , you read it right..).
Why build a Progressive Web App?
Building a high-quality Progressive Web App has incredible benefits, making it easy to delight your users, grow engagement and increase conversions.
Ø Worthy of being on the home screen
When the Progressive Web App criteria are met, Chrome prompts users to add the Progressive Web App to their home screen.
Ø Work reliably, no matter the network conditions
Service workers enabled Konga to send 63% less data for initial page loads, and 84% less data to complete the first transaction!
Ø Increased engagement
Web push notifications helped eXtra Electronics increase engagement by 4X. And those users spend twice as much time on the site
Ø Improved conversions
The ability to deliver an amazing user experience helped AliExpress improve conversions for new users across all browsers by 104% and on iOS by 82%.
