How PWAs are changing the app development game

Can you imagine your phone without apps as we know them today? Some studies show that on average, we now spend over 4 hours per day using apps, with those hours accounting for the majority of how we use our mobile web time.

Since their humble beginnings as games (of which Snake on the 1997 Nokia 6110 is arguably the most famous), mobile apps have come to define how we work, play, and manage our daily lives.

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Mobile apps make sense for customer-centric companies

With customers spending so much time on their smartphones these days, it only makes sense to want to engage with them there. Beyond being where our attention lies, mobile apps let companies do things like:

• Live on customers’ home screens
• Provide experiences that are custom-tailored to their businesses
• Let customers create accounts to personalize these experiences
• Send them push notifications, which the majority of users find useful
• Make use of phone features like cameras, maps, and accelerometers

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But “native” app development comes with headaches

Despite their obvious appeal, creating, launching, and maintaining what most people think of when they think of apps—the ones that we download from the App Store or Google Play, or “native” apps—can be quite painful:

• Because iOS and Android use different programming languages, developing for both means working with a larger team, having two codebases to manage, and higher costs
• Native apps require review and approval by the app stores which slows down releases and updates and can result in outright rejection
• Updates to the iOS and Android operating systems can create breaking changes for apps that have already been released
• Users don’t always have the appetite or storage space to download another app
• Ask a lot of developers how they feel about Apple's App Store, and they’ll use the word “hate.” Despite changes to its policies over the years, complaints remain over Apple’s 15-30% take of revenue from every app sold and in-app purchase made (and the impact of billing going through Apple’s system on customer relationships), its aforementioned review process, and other policies that have been argued in federal court.

It might make sense for your business to have (or be) a mobile app. But the cost, complexity, and user experience of native apps means that they are often not the best first step when developing one.

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Progressive web apps are a simpler, faster, and more cost effective way

Progressive web apps, or PWAs, are mobile apps that overcome the above hassles of native apps while still reaping the benefits of their capabilities and then some. Introduced by Google in 2015, they use the power of web browser technology to provide the same, if not a better mobile experience as traditional apps.

If you’ve visited weather.com, pinterest.com, spotify.com, washingtonpost.com, twitter.com, or instagram.com from Chrome or Safari on your phone, you’ve used a progressive web app. Brands big and small have been creating PWAs that are installable on home screens, accessible offline, can send personalized notifications, and are easier to develop and manage than native apps. As a powerful example, The Weather Channel's decision to develop weather.com as a PWA means that the app works in 178 countries and 62 languages in any browser with just one codebase.

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Because progressive web apps run on the world wide web instead of a proprietary platform, a single PWA can actually do things that native apps can’t, like:

• Have a web address for easy linking and sharing
• House content that can be indexed by search engines to show up in search results
• Always be up-to-date without the need for additional downloads
• Work on any device—not just Apple and Google devices, but Amazon, Windows, and all the rest
• Look good on any screen size from mobile to desktop

All from a single codebase written in commonly-used web programming languages, which means progressive web apps are faster and more affordable to develop than native apps.

Investing in a progressive web app doesn’t preclude it from being in the app stores, either. Technologies like Capacitor by Ionic are making it easy for developers to ship PWAs to app stores using the same code. That means companies no longer have to develop for one special platform, the other, or both at the same time. They can simply develop for the web and then deploy that same app to both stores.

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What’s at stake with native vs. progressive web app development

Big brands love how PWAs let them better serve more customers efficiently, but for startups with limited resources and traction, there’s more at stake.

Jeff Aguy, founder of 2043, understood the importance of choosing to build a progressive web app as the first iteration of his company’s very first app:

“I’m trying to build a startup that has an exit, so it’s important to prove out the concept. There’s something different about having an actual app to test early on that can be easily changed. If I were building for the App Store first, I’d probably be spending five times more than what I have and still might’ve had it all wrong.”

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If you’re a startup founder or business owner who wants to make an app, consider beginning your development journey with a PWA. Since the App Store opened in 2008, new technologies have made it possible to build better mobile apps with less headache. Progressive web apps cost less, are built more quickly, and deliver more than the native apps of yesterday.