Over the past few years, PWAs have been subject to a lot of evolution, many big IT companies like Twitter, Pinterest, and Ali Express, among many others, adopted the concept and created impressive products. But are PWAs the right product for your business? This article can help you decide.
PWAs are the evolution of web applications and responsive websites, trying to evolve the web browser experience to a native mobile experience, but are PWAs the right product for your business? First, let’s talk about the advantages, disadvantages, and limitations of a progressive web application.
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Advantages
There are key advantages when comparing a PWA to a web app (a traditional mobile website).
- Connectivity independence, allows the PWA to work offline most of the time (after the first visit).
- App-like appearance, which helps to remove the search bar from the web browser when you download the PWA on your device.
- Greater product visibility, because you can open your PWA in a web browser or find it on the Google Play Store and Microsoft Store available for download.
- Push notifications. By using web notifications as native push notifications on Android.
- Faster experience, due to its background processing feature, meaning progressive web apps integrate better with mobile hardware.
In conclusion, PWAs offer a significant improvement over traditional responsive websites.
Disadvantages
All the disadvantages are revealed when comparing PWAs with mobile apps (Native and hybrid):
- Mobile applications have adequate access to the low-level hardware components of mobile devices such as accelerometer, NFC, and Bluetooth, PWAs are limited by the limitations of the web operating system.
- Local memory limitations, because PWAs use cache memory for local storage.
- Perceived security of sensitive information in local storage.
- PWAs are slower than mobile apps. Therefore, the UX suffers, especially for video games and applications that require high processor usage.
- User Interface for custom sophisticated graphical interfaces, because native mobile apps have better and more evolved visual frameworks.
Generally speaking, you should be careful when thinking about modifying your mobile app to a PWA.
Limitations
All limitations presented at this time are related to iOS. Even this operating system has enabled some functionalities for PWAs. However, we can see some restrictions compared to others (such as Android and Windows 10)
- There are no push notifications.
- You can’t access components like Face-Id, AR Kit, and Bluetooth.
- Less cache memory usage (50 MB).
- iOS purges the cache frequently, affecting offline functionality and local storage.
- No visibility in the app store.
All limitations are intended to be removed in the near to medium-term future, although it is necessary to take them into account and review the notes for new iOS versions.
The Business Perspective
Now that the most relevant arguments are presented, it is necessary to determine the main characteristics of your desired (or existing) product, the stage of your business, and the costs (creation and maintenance).
Early Stage Startups
Typically, for IT-based MVPs, it is necessary to have products that are fast and focused on market goals, and not think about complex product developments. Entrepreneurs therefore seem forced to decide on a web application or a mobile application development. With a PWA, taking into account the limitations and disadvantages, which should not be an obstacle for the development of an MVP (generally), it is possible to create a product for both approaches (web and mobile).
In terms of cost and development time, the difference between developing an MVP web application and a PWA does not exceed 10% — 15%, and the maintenance efforts are very similar.
The visibility of a PWA product is an advantage. With just one development, you can have a website + mobile website + mobile app, and now add your PWA to Google Play (hopefully in the future also App Store). That way, you’ll have more potential users and test your solution in the market faster.
Startup Refinement and Scaling Stages
If you already have:
- A web application was developed, the updated version is a PWA and migration is something to consider. It’s crucial to be careful with your development team about these migration efforts, especially if your product is older than two years.
- A mobile application, be aware of the limitations and especially the disadvantages of a PWA. Generally, if your mobile app is a market-like product, a PWA would fit as a suitable replacement, because it gains visibility on the web and will not sacrifice the functionality of your mobile app. But, if your app runs on low-end hardware or any other advantages of the mobile apps presented above, keep maintaining your mobile app. Creating a separate PWA will help you get web viewing and users.
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Established Companies
Regularly, IT solutions provided by established companies are 360-degree offerings that include cloud, web, and mobile applications, and even desktop applications. Our suggestion for existing products is the same as for the scaling stages of startups, thinking mainly about optimizing maintenance costs. For new web-based products, we suggest using progressive web apps instead of web apps.
We suggest reviewing with your custom software development company all the aspects and considerations to take into account focused on the peculiarity of your business when thinking about developing a PWA or migrating your applications to a PWA. At Sparkout Tech we will be happy to advise you, so do not hesitate to contact us.
