The world of applications is highly competitive and increasingly crowded. In just the last few years, the number of app store apps more than doubled, peaking at more than 2 million.

​

The impact of this is twofold: app fatigue for users, and immense pressure for application developers and enterprise architects to make sure their apps stand out from the crowd and provide the absolute best user experience. An app that takes more than a few seconds to load, or more than a few clicks to find and download from an app store, can cost you that user.

​

On the positive side, an app that delivers great content seamlessly and quickly, no matter the device, can set your company apart. This is why Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are quickly becoming the standard way to ship these great user experiences to the web. In fact, Gartner predicts that PWAs will replace 50% of consumer-facing apps. While there are various advantages to using PWAs, one that stands out is its ability to work offline, send push notifications, and eliminate the need to download and install from the app stores.

What Are PWA's?

Because they’re web-based, they inherently deliver all the best parts of the web, including an extremely wide reach, instant access, instant updates, and easy shareability.

Compared to traditional mobile web apps, PWAs look and feel much more like a native app — in fact, they’re often indistinguishable from their native counterparts.

They include offline storage and access to native features like push notifications delivered instantly through the web browser. Unlike traditional native apps though, users don’t need to be routed through the app store.

PWAs are also usually much smaller in size than native apps, so they load faster, work better over low-bandwidth networks, and take up less space on a user’s device.