The last couple of years have made a few things very clear. If you have a business online, you need to make it your business to be mobile-first.
Second, your mobile experience needs to be smooth and frictionless if you want it to translate into dollars. Lastly, smartphone users are super fickle and despite downloading over 113 billion apps[1] in 2018, users still regularly use only about 9 apps[2] per day.
So, you need to be on mobile. You need to be awesome on mobile. And people are probably not going to download and use your app regularly. What do you do then?
Build something that combines the slick, user-friendly interface of a mobile app without actually creating an app.
Yes, I’m talking about progressive web apps or PWAs.
In the simplest possible words, a PWA is a mobile-friendly website that behaves like an app but doesn’t need to be downloaded to be used. Users have the option to save a PWA to their phone and launch it just like an app, but it’s totally optional.
There are a whole host of perks that PWAs bring with them while overcoming the inherent disadvantages of building and maintaining a mobile site and a mobile app simultaneously. Let’s take a deeper dive to see how you can get the most out of PWAs[3].
Speed, thy name is PWA
This is undoubtedly one of the most exciting features of PWAs. Businesses can target users who might be on a slow data connection or even those who are offline with a PWA by using mobile development best practices like caching content ahead of time, compression, and more.
Why should you care