Posted by: Daniel Boterhoven on Thu Dec 08
What they are, how they’ve come about, and how they can benefit you and your business. Included is a demonstration of how to install a PWA to your device home screen.
G’day, I’m Daniel from Denim Development.
Today I’m going to be talking all about Progressive Web Apps, what they are, how they’ve come about, and how they can benefit you and your business.
So, a Progressive Web Apps is in essence a web app, which has inherited all the beneficial qualities of a mobile app.
They can do things like be saved to your device home screen, they can receive push notifications, and they can integrate with your device to make use of all sorts of native device features such as biosecurity, accessing your contacts, and receiving device motion signals and things like that. So they’re very beneficial indeed.
They’ve come about due to the improvements in web technology, they weren’t possible ten years ago, but with the improved technology on the web, they’ve been able to make an entrance into the market. They’ve also be spurred on by the increase in mobile device usage worldwide, and in addition to that the still relatively high cost of native app development.
For example, you still need to develop a native app per platform. So, potentially doubling the cost if you want to deploy an app to iOS and Android. Whereas that’s not the case with a PWA. You can build it once and it can be used on both platforms.
So, in essence the benefits of a PWA are the quicker time to market, it’s potentially half the development costs. Then, it’s also got it being cheaper to release than a native app, in that you don’t need to build it once per platform. It can be built once, using the technology of the web and then used on multiple platforms. And another benefit is that you don’t need to go through the app stores. A PWA can be served via the web and you don’t need to jump through all the hooks that for example Apple make you go through.
Now I’m going to show you a demo of a Progressive Web App, and this will be the simple use case of saving it to your home screen. So we’ll start off by just clicking on a PWA link here. And that will of course open it in a web browser. So, once it opens, you will then see a prompt down the bottom of the screen to install that to your home screen. And once you’ve done so, it begins to get installed. And eventually it gets installed onto your home screen. Then from then on you can go to your home screen, tap that app icon, and it will open up just as a normal app would. Once it’s installed, you can of course then start receiving push notifications potentially, and using a lot of other integrated device features. So, it makes them very powerful indeed.
So, yes, it’s worth considering a Progressive Web App for your next project. They’re a new technology, but they come with many benefits such as the one’s I’ve just explained.
Thanks for listening.
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