What are Progressive Web Apps?

Progressive Web Apps (PWA) are built and enhanced with modern APIs to deliver native-like capabilities, reliability, and installability while reaching anyone, anywhere, on any device with a single codebase.

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The Three App Pillars

Progressive Web Apps are web applications that have been designed so they are capable, reliable, and installable. These three pillars transform them into an experience that feels like a native application.

Capable
Between modern APIs, Web Assembly, and new and upcoming APIs, web applications are more capable than ever, and those capabilities are only growing.

The web is quite capable in its own right today. For example, you can build a hyper-local video chat app using WebRTC, geolocation, and push notifications. You can make that app installable and take those conversations virtual with WebGL and WebVR. With the introduction of Web Assembly, developers can tap into other ecosystems, like C, C++, and Rust, and bring decades of work and capabilities to the web too. 

Until recently, only native apps could really lay claim to these capabilities. While some capabilities are still out of the
web's reach, new and upcoming APIs are looking to change that, expanding what the web can do with features like file system access, media controls, app badging, and full clipboard support. All of these capabilities are built with the web's secure, user-centric permission model, ensuring that going to a website is never a scary proposition for users.

Reliable
A reliable Progressive Web App feels fast and dependable regardless of the network.

Speed is critical for getting users to use your experience. In fact, as page load times go from 1 second to ten seconds, the probability of a user bouncing increases by 123%. Performance doesn't stop after the onload event. Users should never wonder whether their interaction—for example, clicking a button—was registered or not. Scrolling and animation should feel smooth. Performance affects your entire experience, from how users perceive your application to how it actually performs.
Finally, reliable applications need to be usable regardless of network connection. Users expect apps to start up on slow or flaky network connections or even when offline. They expect the most recent content they've interacted with, like media tracks or tickets and itineraries, to be available and usable even if getting a request to your server is hard. When a request isn't possible, they expect to be told there's trouble instead of silently failing or crashing.

Users love apps that respond to interaction in the blink of an eye, and an experience they can depend on.

Installable
Installed Progressive Web Apps run in a standalone window instead of a browser tab.

They're launchable from on the user's home screen, dock, taskbar, or shelf. It's possible to search for them on a device and jump between them with the app switcher, making them feel like part of the device they're installed on.

New capabilities open up after a web app is installed. Keyboard shortcuts usually reserved when running in the browser, become available. Progressive Web Apps can register to accept content from other 
applications, or to be the default application to handle different types of files.

When a Progressive Web App moves out of a tab and into a standalone app window, it transforms how users think about it and interact with it.

The best of both worlds

At their heart, Progressive Web Apps are just web applications. Using progressive enhancement, new capabilities are enabled in modern browsers. Using service workers and a web app manifest, your web application becomes reliable and installable. If the new capabilities aren't available, users still get the core experience.

The numbers don't lie! Companies that have launched Progressive Web Apps have seen impressive results. For example, Twitter saw a 65% increase in pages per session, 75% more Tweets, and a 20% decrease in bounce rate, all while reducing the size of their app by over 97%. After switching to a PWA, Nikkei saw 2.3 times more organic traffic, 58% more subscriptions, and 49% more daily active users. Hulu replaced their native desktop experience with a Progressive Web App and saw a 27% increase in return visits.

Progressive Web Apps provide you with a unique opportunity to deliver a web experience your users will love. Using the latest web features to bring native-like capabilities and reliability, Progressive Web Apps allow what you build to be installed by anyone, anywhere, on any device with a single codebase.
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