Most of us couldn’t do without our favourite apps on our phones and other devices. Approximately 150 billion apps were downloaded in 2016, rising to 197 billion in 2017, and downloads are predicted to be in the region of the 305 billion in 2021. But if that’s the case, what makes people think PWAs will replace this growing market?
Google and others have been working on a new way for users to interact with the web. A Google Chrome engineer named Alex Russell coined the term ‘Progressive Web Application’ in his 2015 article, Progressive web apps: escaping tabs without losing our soul.
So, what’s all the fuss about? What are the benefits of PWAs to users, to brands and to developers?
Benefits to the user:
Native apps use up a lot of data on the user’s device, whereas websites use little memory, but are not available offline. PWAs can be used offline, and in areas with poor connectivity on an app-like interface, while using only about the same amount of data as a regular website.
Benefits for brands:
PWAs are attractive to brands because they offer a reduced cost not only in terms of ease of development, but also in ongoing maintenance and updates. The ‘progressive’ in PWA refers to the fact that the application will work across all browsers and devices, and therefore companies only need produce it in one format. It’s common for companies to have a standard website, a native app and a mobile version of their website. This all can be done with one PWA, vastly reducing both development time and cost. And as Google is pushing for PWAs, early uptake will be rewarded with improved SEO, which is another bonus for brands.
Benefits to developers:
A developer can easily build the PWA from HTML, CSS and JavaScript – so there is no need to learn native app languages such as Objective-C or Swift in order to build one. Another huge benefit to the developer is they could publish the PWA directly to the web, without the need to go through an app store. Excitingly, PWAs are starting to gain momentum and there are already jobs popping up on the boards for developers to work exclusively on PWAs.
However, because PWAs are published directly to the web, they won’t have the advantage of being verified and checked by another party. Apps within an app store are verified and checked by Apple and Google (amongst others) so the user knows that they can be trusted. The recent Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal is a scary example of what can go wrong when companies gain access to our data. The data would have been much more difficult to harvest directly through an app because of the strict policies app stores have.
Perhaps you’re thinking that the big players such as Apple will lose a revenue stream by moving to PWAs, and you’re quite right. According to Forbes, it’s estimated that Apple made approximately $11.5 billion of revenue through its App Store alone in 2017. So, there’s no doubt they will be working on a system in which they could generate revenue through PWAs. This will probably come in the form of verification, but exactly how it will be done remains to be seen.
