PWAs – Rescuers from Mobile Bloat
Have you ever felt ridiculously irritated while loading a page on your mobile and you want it to load faster? Well, the fault isn’t on your network always. The problem is the huge size of web pages which has ‘quadrupled’ in five years. This is due to the presence of too many pointless images which carry about 68% of total weight of the page. Thankfully, Google I/O has come up with two mind-blowing initiatives to accelerate the mobile web: PWA (Progressive Web App) and AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages).
Wikipedia defines PWAs as the web applications that are regular websites that can appear to the user like traditional apps or native mobile apps.
The PWAs have combined 'best features’ of mobile app and web such as speed, offline usage, no download features, etc. PWAs along with AMPs are designed to completely enhance the mobile experience and save us from mobile bloats.
Progressive Web Apps are gaining popularity and increasing number of users because of these following characteristics.
Reliable
No matter what the network strength of the place is, they can be easily be accessed. Inferior connections are no more an obstacle for the widespread mobile users to access applications and get benefitted by them.
FAST
The webpages of PWA load faster than traditional mobile apps because they use no pointless images and contain attractive graphics which are more easy to grasp without doing much reading.
Engagement
Because of it’s faster speed and independent network strength, they gain greater attention and engagement from users who prefer PWAs to native mobile apps.
Some noteworthy key features of Progressive Web Apps are:
- They are able to send push notifications which make users coming back to the PWAs.
- They are worth adding to the home screen (and recently to the app launcher) and it loads faster the next time.
- A significant PWA announcement at the Google developer's jamboree was their ability to integrate with payment apps (may it be native or web-based) which allows the user for one-tap payment (faster and more preferred).
- They have the ability to work when there is no internet connection i.e. work offline.
- They are secured via HTTPS.
- They are quite responsive and provide the user a smooth experience.
“The last year has seen a remarkable 215 new APIs, allowing web apps to access even more of the native phone features and apps”, Rahul Roy Choudhury, VP-product management at Google, announced this in this Mobile Web State of Union keynote.
But the most attractive part of PWAs is their small size in comparison to iOS and Android apps. Google I/O has conducted two case studies for size comparison on Twitter lite and OLA cabs.
Isn’t that crazy? The smaller the size the more easy downloads and more convenient usage even during inferior connections. Thus, PWAs have better performance as compared to iOS and Android.
“The OLA cabs PWA usually takes 1-3 seconds to load on your first visit in all the network types”, as said by Dipika Kapadia, head of consumer web products at OLA, to those present at Google I/O. It takes less than a second to load on subsequent visits. This is possible because of its small size (a total of 0.5MB and 0.2MB app data).
Some apps because of their less usage and less engagement face the dustbin of uninstalled apps. These PWAs have push notifications feature that never lets the user forget their existence in the vast sea of applications. According to Dipika Kapadia, head of consumer web products at OLA cabs, “Having a fast, engaging mobile website means we’re no longer turning away potential users who don’t want to use data or space to download an app”.
Patrick Traughber, product manager at Twitter told Google I/O attendees that Twitter Lite receives 1 million daily visits from homepage icon. This results from the ready availability of PWAs to the consumers to their home screens.
Companies with PWA:
- Publishers: Forbes, Independent, Guardian, The Washington Post, CNN, Infobae, Weather Company, etc.
- E-commerce: Flipkart Lite, Lance, Alibaba, Rakuten, Babista, Redmart, OLX, etc.
- Travel companies: MakeMyTrip, Trivago, Wego, Goibibo, Expedia, Air France, Tui, Jumia Travel, Internet, etc.
- Transport companies: OLA cabs, RedBus, etc.
- Social media: Twitter Lite, Telegram, etc.
For an elaborate list, refer Wikipedia.
Extra bonuses of PWAs
- Ever felt sad because you had to uninstall your second favorite app just to give space to a necessary app? All thanks to PWAs for these don’t require any space on your phones to operate.
- In PWA the user is just a click away from the application rather than downloading it from app stores.
- They consume fewer background data.
- Progressive Web Apps don’t require any permission grants for their installments. In fact, they don’t require any installment. Thus, there is no privacy issue.
- It is really a tough job to build an app but PWAs come to the rescue since its very easy to build a Progressive Web Application(PWA) (it’s as simple as web designing).
- For publishing an app the publisher needs to create an account in Play Store which costs roughly $25. But PWAs are totally free!!!
PWAs need only some perfections, otherwise, they are at par with mobile and native apps. Their size, speed, and exclusive features thrill the users and leave them excited enough to return back to the PWAs. Certainly, Progressive Web Applications are hitting the mainstream very fast and are definitely giving the current of traditional apps a run for its money.