Why a PWA Makes Much More Sense?
Case Study: Suitability of a PWA for an eCommerce App
In one of my recent interactions on issues faced with the launch of a mobile app to the app store, I realized that one of the primary reasons behind the popularity of PWAs could be the circumvention of publishing apps to the Google Play Store or Apple’s App Store!
This implied…. No permissions, no restrictions, no rejections!
We had developed native Android and iOS eCommerce applications for specific products that are a legal trade in many geopolitical areas of the world although not in all. And so unfortunately the apps would repeatedly get rejected from Apple’s App Store as well as Google’s Play Store.
There were many more such examples such as an arms and ammunition business app, a pharmacy mobile app, where releasing them on the stores was tedious.
The best solution for this problem was in fact available just around the corner… in the form of a PWA or a Progressive Web Application.
Primarily a web application, installable on mobile devices, a PWA would completely eliminate the need for deploying the application to the mobile stores. This is one of the most attractive features of the PWA that pitches it strongly against native development. Also as businesses shift focus to mobile audiences, the PWA, with its mobile-first design makes this transition seamless and effortless!
Synsoft Global, has an expert team working on PWAs, and you can read more about us here. A previous requirement for which we had developed a PWA using Angular, Ionic and Cordova, was a supply-chain automation system.
Based on our experience and the market study on PWAs, we did a quick research on the current requirement of an eCommerce application. We studied its pain points, and how we could resolve them by implementing a PWA. Here is a quick run through our study…
SAVE TIME & COST
We had put multiple teams to deliver a single product. But now we could dedicate our efforts singularly on one frontend and would still roll out the application across multiple platforms. This generated savings not only in terms of cost but hugely in terms of time, making it an important decision-driving fact for the app’s market strategy.
OFFLINE MODE
Augmented by the power of the “ServiceWorker”, web apps that are built as PWAs can now control network access and can decide which data to cache or how to deal with varying network conditions, enabling it to challenge the native app’s capability to handle network conditions. This opened the door to introducing offline working mode in the app and we are sure this can become a competing USP.
WEB APIS
The app intended to use the device camera and its GPS, as most apps do routinely. And we wanted to be sure the PWA, being web based, gives us this access, as we knew that native and hybrid apps give developers much more access to the device hardware than web apps can. While this might still be the case for some hardware, the web has come a long way. There are now APIs available to a PWA for accessing the device’s accelerometer, location, camera, 3D acceleration and more. This was seen as a major show-stopper earlier, but with all the APIs available today and growing, it has opened the way for PWAs to leap forward.
UI & UX
UI/UX is one of the major differentiating factors between native apps, hybrid apps, and now PWAs. Thanks to several recently standardized features in JavaScript and web browsers, progressive web apps can leverage from a user experience (UX) just as good as native apps. We decided to go with Material-UI, a set of React components that would enable us to implement Google’s material design on the web.
Accessibility
Having made so many decisions around the implementation, the discussion then drifted into the app’s accessibility, distribution and versioning model. Accessibility was in fact the primary reason to convert to a PWA. Having the app installed on the user’s home screen without requiring a download from any app stores was huge! This makes the user engagement of web apps comparable to that of native and hybrid apps.
Distribution and Searchability
Mobile App’s are not easily found on app stores. With Google rolling out mobile-first indexing and endorsing PWAs, this roadblock is easily overcome. There was an edge we had here, as a PWA was a web app after all …searchable and distributable through the world wide web!
Here was a friction-less, easy distribution that ensured a higher conversion rate than finding, downloading, and running a mobile app from the stores.
What’s more, even if we roll out new versions of the app, we need not be worried about maintaining backward compatibility of the apps or their service APIs, because the app always hits only one version of the application and is always serving the latest information!
If you have any queries or need to develop a PWA, feel free to write to us here to get a free consultation.
Originally published at https://www.synsoftglobal.com on July 9, 2019.
