Will Progressive Web Apps Replace Native Apps?
What are PWA’s and native apps?
A progressive web application (PWA) is a type of application software delivered through the web, built using common web technologies including HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It is intended to work on any platform that uses a standards-compliant browser, including both desktop and mobile devices
A native app, or native application, is a software application built in a specific programming language, for the specific device platform, either iOS or Android. Native iOS apps are written in Swift or Objective-C and native Android apps are written in Java.
However, in the recent times, PWA’s are starting to replace native applications as the PWA features narrow the gap between user experience in web-based and native applications.
Why are Native Apps Losing Users?
According to Andrew Chen—a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz—and reported by Smashing Magazine, “the average [native] app loses 77% of users within just three days. By the time the first-month wraps, 90% of those original new users are gone.” Why, you ask?
The app has a difficult onboarding process which warns the user of poor UX.
The navigation within the app is slow, sloppy, or overwhelming.
Gated content makes the app useless without payment, sending users elsewhere.
The app provides an outdated or incomplete experience.
Many of the reasons that people quit using native mobile apps are design-related, but outdated software is also a critical issue and one that can be avoided by creating a progressive web app. It’s incumbent upon the user to update native apps when updates are available, but with a PWA, the updates are done on the server-end and are instantly available to all users automatically.
Why are Progressive Web Apps Better than Native Apps?
Fear of Apple censoring or removing their app-The fear of having an application accepted and then retained in any of the app stores is real. Specifically Apple's App Store, which is extra aggressive in restricting what apps are listed in the store.
Lack of reach to promote their application or high marketing costs to acquire customers-Marketing mobile apps is expensive. Just to get someone to download an app cost $10-30. Then roughly 10% will use the app more than once. That means it costs $100-300 to acquire a new customer.
Consumers Stopped Downloading Native Apps in 2015 as they have become more expensive.
The Web Has Feature Parity with Native Apps.
Consumers Engage More with the Web Than Native Apps as the Hyperlinks Allow Direct Access to the Information that the Consumers want.
PWAs Offer a Cheap Way to Reengage with Clients Through Homescreen Icons, like Native Apps
Many Brands Have Already Begun a Migration From Mobile to PWA as their Search Engines Are Designed to Reach Customers.
These are some of the reasons why majority of the businesses seem to want to migrate from native apps to PWA’s.
Many companies like Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Twitter, Starbucks and other brands you are familiar with have already replaced native apps or are in the process of doing so.
They are choosing PWAs over native or mobile apps because they provide full control over their experience, ability to market and of course lower development and maintenance costs. Consumers are choosing progressive web applications over native options because they are easier to access, require less disk space and are not tethered to a tedious app store experience.
Features of PWA’s:
PWAs are organic search engine friendly- If you nail the PWA features you should have a solid technical SEO platform and rank easier for your target keywords. That solid technical base will also make any PPC or remarketing campaigns cheaper because Google and others will charge less because your landing page's quality is higher. This means you will have cheap, top of the funnel traffic.
Low friction experience for consumers and lower cost channel for businesses-Once someone visits your PWA you can design the service worker to pre-cache key pages and assets on their device. That means the next visit will feel instant, or better than native and that will improve your ability to convert them to a customer.
PWAs are Great for Business-
Users who install your PWA are likely your most engaged users, with better engagement metrics than casual visitors, including more repeat visits, longer time on site and higher conversion rates, often at parity with platform-specific app users on mobile devices.
PWAs work seamlessly in virtually every gadget, the web browsers optimize the pages and make the user experience smooth thereby reducing the efforts that should go into quality assurance and when all these are checked, it directly gives the company a boost in their income.
PWA’s are fast and mobile friendly- This results in an improved user retention rate and increased sales. Infact, Mobile eCommerce sales are expected to make up 72.9% of total eCommerce sales by 2021.
Article by: Tanish Naik
