What is
Google's PWA? Progressive Web Apps are installable and live on the user's home screen, without the need for an app store. They offer an immersive full screen experience and can even re-engage users with web push notifications. In other words, progressive web apps are web applications that are
regular web pages or websites, but can appear to the user like
traditional applications or
native mobile applications.
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Reliable - Load instantly and never show the dinosaur, even in uncertain network conditions.
- Fast - Respond quickly to user interactions with silky smooth animations and no janky scrolling.
- Engaging - Feel like a natural app on the device, with an immersive user experience.
Why build a Progressive Web App?
Building a high-quality Progressive Web App has incredible benefits, making it easy to delight your users, grow engagement and increase conversions.
- Progressive - Work for every user, regardless of browser choice because they’re built with progressive enhancement as a core tenet.
- Responsive - Fit any form factor: desktop, mobile, tablet, or forms yet to emerge.
- Connectivity independent - Service workers allow work offline, or on low quality networks.
- App-like - Feel like an app to the user with app-style interactions and navigation.
- Fresh - Always up-to-date thanks to the service worker update process.
- Safe - Served via HTTPS to prevent snooping and ensure content hasn’t been tampered with.
- Discoverable - Are identifiable as “applications” thanks to W3C manifests and service worker registration scope allowing search engines to find them.
- Re-engageable - Make re-engagement easy through features like push notifications.
- Installable - Allow users to “keep” apps they find most useful on their home screen without the hassle of an app store.
- Linkable - Easily shared via a URL and do not require complex installation.