Simply put, PWA is a web application which looks and works like a native mobile or desktop application. With PWA we can create software for a mobile phone or a tablet using the technologies meant for websites and web applications.
Progressive Web Applications allows us to use the extended functions of each device, such as the camera, geolocation or push notifications. The difference in comparison to a native application is that PWA doesn’t require installation before being used on a phone. We can just open it in a browser and place a shortcut to it on the screen between other icons.
About 5 billion devices are currently in use throughout the world and they are constantly connected to the internet. A very large portion of those devices is smartphones and tablets, mobile devices. Mobile users are three times more likely to use pages which are adapted to their screens than native applications. In addition, a PWA application also allows access to previously downloaded data, even if the device is currently offline.
PWA is nothing else than a website which is adapted to smaller screen sizer. Creating and development of such application are much faster and cheaper than building native mobile applications for Android or iOS.
When creating native applications, we have to reserve funds for separate applications for the most popular operating systems, Android and iOS. This forces us to make two separate applications in two separate categories, not one, as in the case of PWA.
PWA is really a website, so it works on any device you use, as long as it has a browser which supports this technology. We don’t have to create different applications for different versions of the software or for devices with different screen resolutions.
Native applications have lots of downsides, which are avoided by PWA. Aside from the high costs of creation for such applications, there are issues related to updating software or placing apps on Apple or Google stores.
If you have a web application using a single API you can easily just share the API with the PWA. No need to integrate everything from scratch.
Building a PWA significantly increased the speed of the application of mobile devices, which converted directly to a 104% increase of userbase and an 82% increase in conversion on iOS-based smartphones.
Over 500,000 users added the Trivago PWA icon to their devices. For them, it works just like a native mobile application. The transfer to PWA increased conversion by 97%!