Ever since the inception of the concept, developers and business decision-makers are trying to figure out the benefits of Progressive Web Application (PWA). To ease this job, we have listed some of the prominent benefits of PWAs that will help you understand how you can harness the same for your business advantage. But first, you need to realize that Progressive Web Applications are not a magic bullet to online success. They are more of an approach meant to improve your online presence while providing you with the tools and channels to engage your audiences. PWAs go way beyond adding a web-manifest file, registering a service worker, and using HTTPS—it also includes creating a great online experience. Here is how
Progressive Web Apps can help you: 1. Mobile-First Approach Ever wondered why all big techs like Google and Microsoft are pushing PWAs? The main agenda is to encourage businesses to create better mobile experiences because most online interactions are on mobile devices now. Mobile-first responsive design has been in practice for several years, but most websites are still struggling to provide a good mobile-first experience to their users. Here, you can benefit from PWAs since they offer easy hardware integration and load fast, working offline and making the experience optimal on the device the users load your site. PWA helps you attain a better class website that acts as a real tool to improve your business, making visitors want to return. 2. No Store Required The best thing about the web is that it doesn’t need a store for distribution and discovery. All thanks to search engines like Google, Bing, and Yandex that are making discovery easier. Not only this, but the web also has links, allowing you to find the next page in your journey with just one simple click. Stores not only make discovery and distribution difficult, but they take a 30% cut before you even get to income taxes (if you are selling digital goods through your app). Today, we have modern platform features, such as the Payments API that reduces friction, especially on mobile devices, i.e., any of your site visitors can be your customer! 3. Hardware Integration “The web is only about text and images.” If that is what you think, you are missing out. This modern landscape has surprising things for us, e.g., a web that offers great hardware integration. Some of the major features are push, geo-location, real-time camera, data storage, payments, biometric authentication, USB/Bluetooth, motion sensors, native push notifications, etc. Other than that, PWAs help you improve the speed of your web page, require less disk space than native apps, offer instant application update deployments, and are much cheaper to deploy, develop, promote, and maintain than native apps.
Progressive Web Apps: Examples 1. Starbucks
Starbucks built a PWA of the ordering system on the web, which aims at providing accessible, user-friendly online ordering to all of its customers. The company ensured that it delivers a similar experience to its existing native app. Not only this, using Starbucks’ PWA, users can browse the whole menu and customize their orders as per their taste while adding items they like to their carts. And the best part: it works offline. When you go online, you get more options to explore.
MakeMyTrip’s website is yet another great example of PWAs. This India’s leading travel company gets almost eight million visitors monthly, with mobile traffic accounting for two-thirds. The company developed a PWA that is designed to offer a fast, reliable, and polished mobile-web experience. It was required since mobile became the most preferred channel for booking among its customers.
Uber decided to rebuild its web from scratch as a PWA because the company was expanding to new markets. This Uber PWA is meant to offer a comparable booking experience to Uber’s native mobile app along with making car booking viable on low-speed networks like 2G. Uber built it around the concept of an app-like experience that is accessible on all modern browsers. The PWA is an ideal fit for riders on low-end devices that will most likely be not compatible with the native Uber app.
Keeping international growth as the ultimate agenda, Pinterest decided to start their new mobile web experience from the ground up as a PWA. The main reason for this transition was that only 1% of their mobile users converted into sign-ups, logins, or app installs since the app offered poor performance on mobile devices. Hence, they rebuilt the mobile web using PWA technology that led to several positive results, and it is booming today.
Endnote There are other popular platforms like Soundslice, Spotify, PadPiper, Yummly, etc., that have harnessed the power of PWAs for their strategic business advantage. It only takes some time for the users or adopters to understand how PWAs work and how they can benefit you. But the real secret lies in implementing it in a proper way—the way that meets your needs and aligns perfectly with your expectations.