Smart City

PWAs deliver what is known as “an app-like experience”—with a web browser in full-screen mode you wouldn’t even know you’re working within a website. Still, many of the benefits of using a PWA don’t have to do with their features and functionality. Native apps are still more robust and can be written for any use. But PWAs were conceived as a way to sidestep, or even eliminate, a lot of the headaches associated with native app development, and the list of reasons to use them shows this:

Hassle-Free Experience.
If you clicked on the game link above, you experienced just how easy it is to start using a PWA. It takes almost no effort on the user’s part to try your app out. For native apps, there are some pesky extra steps of going to the app store, finding the app, downloading, installing, and then finally using it. And that’s assuming the person already knows about their app specifically. If they’re just doing general searches for a type of app, like a game, then they’ll browse through several. App makers need to spend a lot of time optimising their creation for the app store—researching keywords users might search, including it in the description (which they have to write), selecting and designing effective screenshots. It’s a process to convert a user. Compare that to arriving at a website and instantly using the app, with the ability to save the link to your home screen as an icon. It’s hard to deny the appeal.

Universal Compatibility.
PWAs leverage the latest capabilities of HTML5, which is the current version of the coding language the web was built on over 25 years ago. It’s the standard for web content, and all a user needs to access it is a modern browser. For the record, a “modern browser” is defined as “a pre-loaded app that everyone uses every day on every device everywhere, all the time.” There are 3.77 billion internet users worldwide; even if only half of them were running a browser that supports HTML5, that’s more than 1.8 billion people who are a single click away from using your PWA. On the flipside, you can make an iPhone app and reach around 700 million people, leaving a few billion more Android users you won’t.