Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) have been shaping up over the past couple of years to take on more native app behaviours, gaining abilities like notifications and location awareness.
We’ve talked about this before, but the move to the open web as an app delivery platform is pretty substantial. The way Google is approaching this is pretty amazing, developing tools that all browsers can agree on is paramount to web apps being the go-to delivery method of the future.
With pretty stellar interoperability shaping up, all these new abilities we’re about to look at will eventually work across all major browsers. Google isn’t baking in new features just for Chrome: they are helping to push web development forward for everyone, and that is important.
The minute all browsers support the same functions and abilities, the web becomes the largest, widest, and most scalable platform for development. As we’ve seen with game developers like Epic, you can distribute apps outside the standard ecosystems and survive. Web apps will make this a reality across the board and pave a way for a future where it doesn’t matter what device, operating system, browser or app store you use: one app can be written for them all because they can all leverage the open web.
The key takaway? It is working well for them. With the bevy of new tools and abilities coming in the near future, it wouldn’t be surprising to see web giants starting to finally return full focus to their web interfaces and shift focus away from their native apps. As larger properties do this, smaller ones will also follow suit. As the web finally gets to realize its full potential as an app delivery service, the way we use, download, and leverage apps on the web is set to change forever.