You may not be familiar with the jargon of the web and all this emerging technology nowadays but, more than likely, you’re familiar with the results with the Denver web design process. Does the term native app ring a bell? I’m guessing not being that it’s mostly a term used in the tech world for people who actually build apps. No matter though, a native app is simply any app you install directly onto a mobile device from either the Google Play Store or Apple App Store. Anything from the Facebook app to the Notes app on iPhones are native apps, meaning that they’ve been built specifically for a tablet or a phone. These apps are built in a specific language to work on your tablet or phone that accomodate features that native apps are known for like push notification. No doubt, you know what a website is. Have you ever noticed that when you look at a website on your phone you never receive push notifications after closing the browser out? That somewhat sums up the difference between websites and native apps (that’s not close to being everything but the idea remains), depending on what features you want to implement, your project had to be built a specific way. This creates a gap between websites and native apps, making it highly expensive and far more time consuming to create 3 (website, Android app, iOS app) different versions of the same thing to deliver the same product all for the sake of ease-of-use for consumers.
You may not have noticed the differences really or at least spent time contemplating them, why would you? Well, luckily for you, Google has been. It doesn’t seem to be very well known, at least it’s not major news, but for some time Google has been pushing something they call Progressive Web Apps. Don’t get me wrong, these have been around for a bit of time now but have taken awhile to really gain some popularity. We can see this with the latest update to Google Chrome (Chrome 73) in which Google has started integrating in the feature to download the Progressive Web App (PWA) version of certain sites to your desktop. I checked to make sure my Chrome version was updated and the feature was not on there yet but this could be due to more of a soft rollout for the feature since it’s a limited number of sites that have a PWA version. None-the-less this is a pretty big step for the web.
Here’s why.