PWA | Progressive Web Application

Have you ever wondered why you get this download icon in the URL bar when you are using some website?

So let us understand this, we can instantly download the application and it would require very little space in your system.

We either have a desktop application a mobile application or a web application. But PWA helps us to use a web application as a desktop/mobile application.

PWA reduces app development and maintenance costs and is quite good in reach.

How does PWA have good reach and how does it reduce the cost? Consider this using the below graph.

Capabilities are hardware/platform dependency. Reach is how easily you can access a particular application.

Desktop or mobile applications are more dependent on capabilities and to gain reach they need superb marketing strategies. Also, the development and maintenance costs for the application are higher. So the cost is increased in both aspects, marketing and development.

Web applications, have a good reach as can be accessed anywhere through browsers but may lag in gaining the hardware capabilities.

so PWA is a good solution to balance out both web applications and mobile/desktop applications.

How PWA works?

whenever you click on the download icon from the URL bar it creates an application-like icon on your device and when you open that application it gives you feel like you are using an actual application and not a website.

So to make this happen PWA uses service workers. These service workers help your application stay connected to servers.

if you're connected to the internet these service workers will update your information/request to servers immediately. and if you’re offline mode they keep the data stored in local storage(in case of form submission) and as soon as you're back online it passes on the information/request to servers.

These service workers also help to get the latest version of the website to your application(any UI/UX or functional changes).

To summarize how PWA is helpful and what are its disadvantage consider below points:

• PWA gives an application illusion (push notifications and browser headers are not visible)
• PWA has caching capabilities that help to work offline mode and in online mode accessing applications is quick(performance is improved in online mode).
• The actual application would take up more space on the device. PWA requires less space
• PWA helps save costs for maintaining multiple applications(web/mobile/desktop).
• PWA may still have a few issues accessing data from other applications available in your device (e.g., the user can do an SSO login with some XYZ application that won't be possible as PWA is not a proper application and to access data from one application to other you would require proper mobile/desktop application).

To know how to implement these PWAs to your website stay tuned for the next blogs.