What are Progressive Web Apps? Benefits, Types and Cost
It has been a few years since Progressive Web Apps became a significant player in the web industry and have made a tremendous impact. Recent years have seen a substantial rise in the popularity of Progressive app development services within the industry, mainly owing to their immense benefits, such as the saving in development costs they provide.
PWA’s market size is predicted to surpass $10 billion by 2027, with a CAGR of 31.9%, indicating that the market will grow fast.
Over 45% of the companies in North America and Europe alone are either using PWAs or plan on using PWAs shortly, which is the case in both regions.
As a result of developing these web app applications, you can build a robust web app that is similar to a native mobile app without the need to spend a lot on web development while reducing your development costs.
This article aims to help you understand the advantages of progressive web apps to businesses and the factors that affect the development cost of a PWA.
What are Progressive Web Apps?
As its name implies, a Progressive Web App (PWA) is an application that is created and runs on the web browser, giving it the feeling of a native mobile app and having the benefits of the web browser. As a result, businesses can reach their customers on the web and utilize the features of a mobile app.
This looks at how a PWA is built by combining HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc., with a code base that can be used across multiple operating systems, browsers, and devices (desktop, mobile, tablet) on one computer.
Adoption of Progressive web apps
A recent report published by Forrester suggests the progressive web app (PWA) market is expected to grow from $1.4 billion in 2020 to $5.8 billion by 2023. Several factors can be attributed to this increase in adoption.
Some of these factors, such as demand from business users and increased security requirements, may contribute to the increased adoption of these applications, which are expected to become more ubiquitous soon.
With the steady drop in the price for various front-end technologies, the development of PWAs has become more accessible and affordable than ever before.
Therefore, if you consider adding a Progressive Web App (PWA) to your existing website or improving your current site’s mobile compatibility, now might be the right time to get started.
Why should businesses invest in Progressive Web Apps?
Business owners can benefit in several ways from Progressive Web Apps. An excellent example of this is the ability to make the app available over the web, which enables business owners to save tons of time and resources which could be dedicated to other aspects of their business instead.
There are countless benefits to be gained from implementing PWA for your business, some of which are listed below.
Automatic Updates
PWAs are software applications that automatically update without the need for end users to do anything, which is excellent for people who have a lot of apps and don’t have the time to update them all. As soon as you open the app, they automatically update themselves. As a result, users won’t have to download all of the updates at once or reinstall apps over and over.
Moreover, these solutions are fully integrated into a browser, so you can enjoy a new look and feel without any additional work — which gives you more time to devote to what matters to you.
As a side effect of progressive web apps, they even send push notifications when new updates are available to the user. As a user, you are entirely in control of what content people can see so that you can provide a greater level of customer service.
A reduction in development costs and an increase in return on investment
A business owner doesn’t need to invest in multiple resources to build a website and native app (both of which will need to be developed separately) to develop a Progressive Web App. Instead, if a business owner decided to build a Progressive Web App, all their developers had to do was develop a single codebase that would render both the website and the native app in one go. Thereby reducing the cost of development by a significant amount.
Adaptable to poor network conditions
With the App Shell model, you can store all the assets and resources of the application in cache storage, enabling it to operate even over slower connections with the network since it is designed to use Service Workers to store the assets and resources of the application. The initial load of the server must be fast and reliable to ensure that the cache can store a sufficient amount of data for the cache to be effective.
App Aggregators are not needed
The distribution channel of a PWA is not a concern to a business when it determines to develop one for its product. As a result, a PWA app can readily be downloaded from the browser and is readily available. They no longer need to rely on Apple App Store or Google Play Store to distribute their applications, so they do not incur additional costs on distribution channels and platforms.
Updates and loading times are faster
Most PWA apps load from a Service Worker API, so the PWA app’s loading time is considerably shorter than when loading from a standard API. PWA apps mainly run on the web, so updating them is quite easy and quick compared to traditional apps.
Accessible
The search engine results for progressive web apps can also be found on search engines as websites can. You can create a web app that will be visible on the search engine, and that can be readily installed onto the device of the person who found it through the search engine and who finds it through the search engine. As a result, businesses involved in digital commerce can benefit from this.
Fast, safe, and offline work
To make progressive web apps as fast and as reliable as possible, they use the service workers technology, which hides behind the camera and caches the information loaded every time you run these apps. A PWA can perform even without an internet connection, thanks to the caching of the data. A PWA is further protected by HTTPS encryption, so they are fairly secure as they are served through this protocol.
UI/UX improvements
Providing users with a user-friendly application has become one of the most critical aspects of providing a better user experience and ranking on search engines.
Essentially Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are web apps that mimic the look and feel of native mobile apps but provide the speed, responsiveness, and database access of native mobile apps without the significant costs and difficulties associated with building an app from scratch.
A responsive layout has been used to provide users with an enjoyable experience, with push notifications and responsive layouts — similar to those they would expect to find with a mobile application.
As well as offline functionality, background sync functionality, and game engine support, they also offer unique advantages that other web technologies do not. In the Play Store and App Store, PWAs are highly rated by customers due to all these advantages.
What is the cost of building a PWA?
You can never really know what the cost of a PWA will be, and many factors are involved. The process of creating a web application involves several steps. To make progressive mobile applications, PWA app development company need to keep three things in mind to ensure that they are successful:
- Layout complexity
- Time to make a plan
- Amount of features that can be implemented
Roughly $8000 to $22000 goes into building a progressive web app. In addition to having app features and website functions, progressive web apps offer a lot of utility for users.
Conclusion
The future of website development lies in progressive web apps (PWAs). The apps have the same behavior and look normal, but they can be installed on any internet-enabled device and compatible with any browser. Due to the way PWAs have grown in popularity, there is a great deal of competition among developers to create them.
