A web app is one of the most common means for connecting users to your company or products. Many organizations also create a mobile-app version of their website for their user base. Very large sites, such as Google Plus, eBay, Amazon and others, develop different code-bases for their web app, Android app, iOS app or other operating systems.

Though separate code bases help deliver true, OS-tailored performance, maintaining code for various platforms can be difficult and expensive. First, there’s the overhead of staffing multiple coding teams, which is compounded by the added expense of ongoing code-base maintenance and updates. This is where the ‘progressive’ web application comes into play.

What Is a Progressive Web Application?

The progressive web app integrates contemporary technologies, such as service workers, and takes an offline-first approach, to give users a familiar, app-like experience. Progressive web apps may be visited online from a URL, or installed via the same. They are so named because over time, as users ‘progressively’ build a relationship with the app, it becomes more and more powerful, according to Google.

Benefits of Progressive Web Apps

These applications offer a range of benefits most companies find attractive, including:

Economy: With mobile apps and web apps sharing the same base.
Responsiveness: The ability to adjust to any screen size or resolution.
Usability: They can be installed and run offline, using service workers to supply resources from the cache.
Versatility: Adherence to the W3C Manifest specification identifies the web app as a bona fide application.
Engagement: Adherence to the W3C Push API specification supports web-app user engagement with Push Notifications.
Security: Progressive web apps are always served via https so they are not vulnerable to outside tampering.
Flexibility: They can be run from a URL, like a normal web app, and be installed to a user’s home screen, right from the browser.

One Minus: Backward Incompatibility

Unfortunately, the technologies required to run progressive web apps are only available for newer browsers, thus posing limitations for developers targeting older browsers.

Bright Future

From TA Digital’s perspective, the future of the web applications has never been brighter. With robust and ever-improving technologies such as Chrome extensions, the Firefox OS, and GitHub’s Electron open-source framework paving the way for installable apps, progressive web apps take mobile performance up a notch by making it platform independent.

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Contact us today for more information about reducing mobile or web-app development costs with progressive web technology.

About TA Digital

TA Digital is the only global boutique agency that delivers the “best of both worlds” to clients seeking to achieve organizational success through digital transformation. Unlike smaller, regional agencies that lack the ability to scale or large organizations that succumb to a quantity-over-quality approach, we offer resource diversity while also providing meticulous attention to the details that enable strategic success.

Over the past 20 years, TA Digital has positioned clients to achieve digital maturity by focusing on data, customer-centricity, and exponential return on investment; by melding exceptional user experience and data-driven methodologies with artificial intelligence and machine learning, we enable digital transformations that intelligently build upon the strategies we set into motion. We are known as a global leader that assists marketing and technology executives in understanding the digital ecosystem while identifying cultural and operational gaps within their business – ultimately ushering organizations toward a more mature model and profitable digital landscape.

Recognized in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2019, 2020 and 2021 Inc. 5000 list as one of the fastest growing companies in the United States, TA Digital is pleased also to share high-level strategic partnerships with world class digital experience platform companies like Adobe, SAP, Acquia, commercetools, Sitecore, and Elastic Path.