Why PWAs Might Be the Future of the Mobile Web
Tags: Mobile, Pwa, Smartphones, Mobile Web, Web Development

Mobile use is growing all the time. In Q1 2019, 65% of all retail website visits were made through a smartphone, and 53.9% of all online retail sales revenue is expected to be generated via m-commerce by 2021.

Today, customers expect to be able to do everything on their phones, and without any friction. It’s no longer enough for businesses to deliver a high-quality online experience; they need to offer the best mobile visitor experience too.

With this in mind, many businesses have launched native apps. Apps have many benefits over mobile websites. They’re faster, they’re easier for customers to navigate, and they’re more appealing to customers who now spend more time on apps than browsers. Apps drive more than twice as many ecommerce transactions in North America as mobile websites do.

Image source: https://criteo.investorroom.com/2018-09-20-Criteos-Q2-2018-Global-Commerce-Review-Points-to-Continued-Worldwide-Growth-of-In-App-Transactions

Apps are how we use our phones, and we live on our phones.

Businesses want mobile apps, and web designers want to deliver. The trouble is that coding an app requires a different skillset to web design, so you might have to outsource the project to an app coder. The extra cost in both time and resources can seriously delay the completion of a project, and requires you to convince your client to up their budget.

Enter the progressive web app (PWA). PWAs are faster and lower-cost to build, easy for users to share and install, have lower ongoing development needs, and bring added SEO benefits for your clients. So as a format, compared to native mobile apps, PWAs are easier and cheaper for web designers to deliver, and they might also perform better for clients.

PWAs could be the ideal solution for both you and your web design clients. Let’s take a deeper look at some of the specifics.

What is a Progressive Web App?

Introduced by Google in 2015, the progressive web app (PWA) is a clever combination of the best features of both apps and mobile sites.

Like an app, PWAs are fast and powerful, with simple app-like navigation, an icon to add to the user’s home screen, and easier access to smartphone features like push notifications, camera use and geolocation tracking.

But the cost of building a PWA is closer to that of a mobile site — far cheaper than a native app. They are easy to set up, like a mobile site.

Image source: https://help.duda.co/hc/en-us/articles/360000684748-Progressive-Web-App-PWA-

In fact, when your agency builds sites on Duda’s design platform, you can publish a PWA version of any website from within the platform with just a few clicks. Nothing could be simpler.

Are PWAs taking off?

It’s difficult to predict anything for sure in the world of tech, but there’s every sign that PWAs are here to stay. A recent poll of JAXenter’s audience found that 46% see PWAs as the future, versus 14% who asserted that “native apps will prevail.”

Image source: https://jaxenter.com/react-native-tool-native-vs-pwa-poll-150667.html

PWAs have been adopted by major corporations across industries, including Twitter, Forbes, Housing.com, Smashing Magazine, Flipboard, the Washington Post and Kana. These businesses enjoyed a significant rise in metrics like pages per session, conversion rates, and time on site when they switched to PWAs instead of mobile-friendly websites.

Introducing a PWA has been found to enable a 68% lift in mobile traffic compared with mobile websites, and 43% drop in bounce rates.

PWAs have powerful champions. According to Google, PWAs are “a new way to deliver amazing user experiences on the web.” Google’s new Chrome for MS10 has made PWAs accessible from the Microsoft desktop, while Chrome 72 brought PWAs in to the Play store for the first time.

At the same time, Apple is slowly but steadily making PWAs more reliable, accessible and effective on iOS devices. The new Apple Webkit supports “service workers,” those snippets of JavaScript that power PWAs. What’s more, Apple iOS 12.2 rolled out a number of fixes for ongoing PWA bugs on iPad and iPhone, including enhanced support for resuming sessions within PWAs and for using gestures in PWAs.

Why demand is rising for PWAs

PWAs have to compete with two rivals: mobile websites, and native apps. So far, they’ve shown significant benefits over both these alternatives.

When it comes to mobile websites, PWAs are far more reliable. They rarely freeze or crash, and load noticeably faster. What’s more, unlike mobile sites, PWAs create an icon on the device home screen to serve as a visual reminder to users to connect with your company, and can interact with smartphone gadgetry like camera, GPS, and push notifications that boost omnichannel marketing.

PWAs also have offline accessibility, thanks to the aforementioned service workers that manage the caching of assets.

The benefits of a PWA over a native app include:

● Lower risk to build and publish. Native apps cost a lot to create. If the audience doesn’t use the app regularly, they’re likely to stop using it entirely and delete it from their phones to save memory, so investing the capital to build the app is a big gamble. PWAs have lower costs, so you can offer app capabilities for lower risk.

● Easy to share. Unlike a native app, people can share the URL for a PWA like a regular link, helping it to spread.

● Low-friction installation. PWAs can be installed directly from the browser in just a few clicks. There’s no need for users to visit an intermediary app store, and no need for businesses to pay the fees and find a way through the complicated process of app store acceptance.

● Greater flexibility. One PWA can run on both iOS and Android, saving on development costs and increasing the ease of use.

● No ongoing development needs. PWAs don’t typically need the regular updates of a native app in order to maintain device compatibility and stay up to date with the latest OS versions.

● More lightweight. PWAs take up less memory than native apps, which is a key concern for users.

● Added SEO benefits. Apps can only be found in an app store, but PWAs can rank high on regular website search engines. This makes them easier to find, while also offering another route to improve SERP rankings.

PWAs are the solution for web design agencies and their clients

Businesses want native app capabilities like greater reliability, home screen icons, and integration with smartphone tools like GPS, camera, and push notifications, but they don’t want to spend the money or take the gamble of developing true native app.

Web design agencies want to deliver on their clients’ needs for a native app, but lack the time, skills, and often the client budget to do so. PWAs solve all these challenges, combining the best of both worlds in a way that makes them the future of the mobile web.