Mobile websites or PWAs – how to decide one for your business

All you need to just take out your phone and search on the web. It just takes a few minutes to get your problem solved. But what matters most today is the kind of mobile experience or web experience that users are looking for.

Mobile websites or PWAs not only streamlines your business or gives you a seamless customer experience but also give a competitive advantage over others. Inspiring, isn’t it? Yes, we are talking about none other than custom web apps.

The mobile app industry is rapidly growing fast today. Year by Year, people are investing more time on mobile devices to access the internet.

People consume around 2x the amount of content on mobile devices to access the internet in the world today.

Website owners should be excited about this prospect in 2019 as the opportunity to reach these mobile users is still is getting bigger.

As the number of mobile consumers rises, it is expected that almost 54% of e-commerce sales by 2021 will happen on mobile instead of traditional websites.

Read also: Battle of the Mobile App Frameworks – React Native vs Native

Progressive Web Apps: A Brief Description

Progressive Web Apps are also known as PWAs. It is an advanced form of responsive websites that behaves like native apps or mobile apps. PWAs cater web pages in a user’s browser seamlessly so they can have a mobile app-life experience.

PWAs have an app like UX, delivered through the web with advanced technologies to optimize the user experience. It is midway between mobile websites and mobile apps.

PWAs are mobile sites built with modern JavaScript frameworks that are designed to work like a native app. They can be added easily to a mobile device’s home screen with an icon.

PWAs are dynamic and can be personalized according to user’s needs like push notification, option to enable locations, camera access, and even the ability to add the mobile experience to your home screen. 

Google defines PWAs as web experiences that are:

• Reliable – Load instantly and never show a website as being down, even in uncertain network conditions.
• Fast – Respond quickly to user interactions and no irrelevant scrolling.
• Engaging – Feel like a natural app on the device, with immersive user experience.

Read also: What Is Best for You: Mobile Website or Responsive Design?

A Close Look At Mobile Websites

Mobile Websites are responsive websites designed specifically for mobile phones. It automatically scales to fit the screen size of your viewers’ device. They often live under a separate URL and are completely distinct from the full site.

They are often contrasted with responsive sites, which typically contain the same content and functionality for mobile and desktop, but rearrange these features on mobile.

Responsive web design is becoming the new standard for websites that are not only mobile-friendly, but that can scale to any sized device -from desktop down to tablet and handheld smartphones.

Difference between Mobile Websites and PWAs

Mobile websites have the same functionality as the progressive web apps other than the scale of a site. So, you’re wondering how PWA is different from mobile websites. Aren’t they just website too? The webpage is just the beginning of PWAs, and where it’s separated from responsive web apps is in its functionality. The more you involve in the functionality layer of progressive web apps the more you get the feeling like native apps and easily differentiate responsive web.

PWAs are dynamic and can be personalized according to user’s needs like push notification, option to enable locations, camera access, etc.

You don’t have to download PWAs, with Google’s full support of PWAs, they’re accessible through the google or add home screen icon directly through Android.

Let’s see how PWAs are different from mobile websites.

Push Notification

The major difference between progressive web apps and mobile websites is to push notification. The progressive web apps ask users to subscribe to notifications. Once the user subscribed, they get a subscription ID where each push notification of every user is unique. Lyft is a great example of how PWA uses push notification to maximize its potential. PWAs permit users to automatically enable push notification to ease in having a great customer experience.

Add to Home screen

 PWAs can live directly onto your phone screen with just a home screen icon. Android users directly get home screen icons of PWAs while iPhone users get this icon after using Safari’s “Add to home screen” features. Adding to the home screen icon is just like adding icing on the cake to PWAs.

Read also: Which Mobile Platform Startups Should Choose In 2020: Android Or iOS?

Higher Loading Speed

PWAs are using “App Shell” comprising the code that got cached to your mobile when you load it to the first time and then it can be subsequently run, making it much faster and feel like a real app. As the content are already in cached so it makes it possible for PWA to run in offline mode as well.

Adoptive 

Unlike a mobile website, the responsive design of PWAs makes capable it to run any type of device. Also, you don’t need to develop separate coding for the platform (Android, iOS, web).

Tonnes of big brand companies like Flipkart, Lyft, Twitter, Starbucks have already adopted PWAs. PWAs have all the functionality like mobile websites and the opportunities are endless.

In the battle of progressive web apps and mobile websites, no one is the winner. Both technologies have their pros and cons and you have to decide which technologies are right for your business requirements. For seamless mobile experience, you must choose the progressive web apps and if you’re looking to increase site speed and availability for most users, mobile websites might be the better choice.

If you want to offer a seamless mobile experience to your customers, you can even outsource product development to third-party providers that can help you develop your product (web or app) in a fast and efficient manner.