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01 May 2018

Native vs Progressive Web Application (PWA)

I recently watched a video comparing Native vs Progressive Web applications. It was about how a PWA can look and behave as much as possible as a Native app. There was a part something like - look here the browser address bar isn’t even visible and look we can add a shortcut to this page on the Home screen. Great so we are deceiving the user and it is not clear he is in the browser by hiding the address bar. So we are fragmenting the places we can have bookmarks to pages in the browser and on the Home screen - yes it is convenient to have an option in the browser to be able to place a bookmark to a page on the Home screen, but it is an option and the user should make a concise decision if it is something that he uses that much that he needs it on the Home screen, not some norm for all web applications. My point is if it is no obscure that we are using a web application that is running in the browser, the next things is users searching for an update at the App Store for this application, because they have forgotten that it is a site they are visiting with the web browser. And yes a big one is - if it is a web application it is write once run everywhere. Well yes, if you have written it with support for every browser that is. Users can run any number of browsers on their devices and if it is going to be “run everywhere”, then you need to build support for all the browsers. At least if it is native application with web content
it has to support only the Native WebView components for the systems. There is nothing bad about having a web application instead of Native application, there are pros and cons, but be proud of the good things about having a web application and be proud it is running in the web browser.

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