Brands That Are Switching To Progressive Web Apps For Speed
by Jillian MacNulty | Last Updated: Nov 8, 2017
by Jillian MacNulty | Last Updated: Nov 8, 2017
“It combines, on one hand, the discoverability and accessibility of a website with the functionality of a native app.” - Rolf Schromgens, co-founder and managing director, TrivagoInstagram I’ll admit, this is one of the most frequently used native apps on my phone at the moment, so when I heard talk of Instagram’s web experience during one of the keynotes at this year’s Chrome Dev Summit, I was skeptical. I already love the app, so why would I ever feel the need to displace it with a web experience? Well, it was time for me to take a dose of my own PWA-preaching medicine, because I was floored at the speed of Instagram’s PWA. Immediately I noticed significant decreases in load times (which have, oddly enough, been very laggy on the native experience lately), and that alone was enough for me to pull the trigger and save it to my homescreen. As an added bonus, the Instagram PWA allows for use of the native camera just like the native app, as well as push notification capabilities. It’s a web experience that can (and, in my case, did) replace the native app with ease. It’s an exciting time for mobile tech, with big-name brands like the ones above rolling out PWAs as the new standard for mobile web experiences. There’s no doubt that today’s consumers are always on-the-go, and when they want information, they want it now and not a second later. Brands are catching on to the fact that PWAs increase the speed of mobile experiences significantly, which ultimately makes for happier customers and higher conversion rates. So, the question is...which brands are next?