Can Progressive Web Apps Take The Lead Among Cross-Platform Mobile Frameworks?

Apr 15
14:58

2017

Harnil Oza

Harnil Oza

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The use of mobile apps in today’s society of app development cannot be exceeded. With Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS managing the landscape, higher than 4.2 million mobile applications have been developed for these two platforms within fields like music, education, gaming, enterprise, and so ahead; so confirming the assertion that almost all mobile devices now work on these two platforms.

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The role of mobile apps in today’s world of app development cannot be overemphasized. With Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS controlling the landscape,Can Progressive Web Apps Take The Lead Among Cross-Platform Mobile Frameworks? Articles more than 4.2 million mobile apps have been produced between these two platforms within categories such as music, education, gaming, business, and so forth; thus confirming the assertion that almost all mobile devices now operate on these two platforms.

The frameworks on which these two mobile platforms run are basically different: Java for Android, while Objective-C and Swift for iOS. This has led apps development companies into targeting these main frameworks and focusing on getting two teams: one for Android, and the other for iOS.

With the high popularity that cross-platform frameworks and transpilers have gained in recent times, app developers are now able to utilize a single code base in targeting several platforms. This in turn has brought about a reduction in development time and cost. One of such cross-platform frameworks is Progressive Web Apps.

The goal of Progressive Web Apps is to cause web applications to act like their native equivalents. Progressive Web Apps attempt to be fast, engaging, and reliable. The meaning of this is that apps ought to be fast, offer a fluid and captivating user experience, and encourage native features such as offline access or push notifications. Over time, the PWA spec will include fresh functionality and features. Developers will then be able to select the number of features they intend to implement, thus causing PWA to be the most adaptable method to get to mobile users.

There are some uniqueness that are peculiar to Progressive Web Apps. The first is the fact that even though installing them on the home screen of a user is possible, delivery through Google Play or App Store is not possible. Instead, whenever a user pays a visit to a PWA, they are offered with a choice to have it added to their home screen. The interesting thing about this is that it offers power to the app developers to have their applications updated and delivered without the user being forced to do anything.

Another uniqueness of Progressive Web Apps is that, with search engines, it can be indexed and scraped. The major advantage of this is that discoverability is importantly increased and deeper integrations in the future are possible.

Considering all of this, can Progressive Web Apps become the leader among cross-platform mobile frameworks? To answer this question, the user must firstly know the pros and cons of Progressive Web Apps. These are highlighted below:

Pros

  • A separate code base is not required. The mobile application is the web application.
  • Apps will enjoy indexation and can be discovered via search engines.
  • For a user to “install” the app on his/her mobile device, there is no need for the app to pass through the Google Play or App Store.


Cons

  • On iOs, the support for PWA is limited.
  • There will be no access to several native APIs.
  • There will be no accessibility to the App through Google Play Store or App Store.


In conclusion, Progressive Web Apps can be described as an improvement of already existing web technologies. As of 2016, the implementation of Progressive Web Apps was in the Google Chrome browser; however, the features required may be supported by more browsers in the future.