Progressive web apps: An alternative to the native mobile Apps

Abstract

The mobile apps have been reaching a huge success on the mobile market. This opportunity attracted a lot of interested companies to have their own optimized mobile apps for all major mobile operation systems. However, these developments are expensive when developed natively for each mobile platform. New improvements done on the web technologies, allowed more features and capabilities than previously was only possible on apps that was developed natively. This started new possibilities on consolidate all developments only on web apps, that are apps that runs on web browsers. This paper intends to understand which evolutions, capabilities and limitations exists on developing a web app to run in all devices. We present the new concept of Progressive Web App, created by Google, in a way to normalize all web developments. It will be introduced the major advantages on developing the apps centralized as a Progressive Web App, comparing on developing the same solution for each different mobile platform. It will be also described the current state of web technologies and in which preferable scenarios the Progressive Web Apps are a strong alternative to the mobile native apps.