Progressive Web App (PWA) Development

Three things, all served over HTTPS: a web app manifest that describes the name, icons and display mode, a service worker that controls network requests and enables offline behaviour, and a responsive interface that works at any size. That is the technical floor. The practical definition is a site that can be installed to a home screen, launches without browser chrome, and stays usable on a poor connection. A progressive web app is not a separate technology you adopt wholesale: it is a set of capabilities you add to a website, which is why the migration path is usually incremental rather than a rebuild.

When your users arrive from search or a link rather than from an app store, when you need one codebase across platforms, and when you want to ship updates without waiting on review. A progressive web app is indexable, linkable and installable without a store listing, which removes the biggest barrier for a first time visitor. Native still wins where you need deep hardware access, background processing, tight platform integration or presence in the store as a distribution channel in its own right. Plenty of businesses genuinely need both, and we will say when yours does.

The service worker sits between the application and the network, so it can serve cached responses when a request fails or when you deliberately prefer the cache. The realistic goal is usually resilience rather than a fully offline product: the shell, recently viewed content and static assets stay available, and actions taken while disconnected are queued and replayed when the connection returns. What you cache and for how long is a design decision with real consequences, because an over eager cache serves people stale prices or old content. We treat cache invalidation as part of the build, not an afterthought.

Installation works across current Android and desktop browsers, and on iOS through the Add to Home Screen flow in Safari, where the app then runs in its own window. Web push is supported on Android and desktop, and on iOS for applications the user has added to their home screen. The caveats matter: iOS has historically supported these capabilities later and more narrowly than Android, so if push notifications are central to your product rather than a nice addition, that should shape the platform decision at the start rather than be discovered during testing.

Favourably, because a progressive web app is still a website: it has real URLs, is crawlable, and is indexed normally, which is the main advantage over a native app that search engines cannot see into. The performance gain comes from caching the shell and assets, so repeat visits avoid a large amount of network work. We build against the Core Web Vitals thresholds, LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds and CLS under 0.1 at the 75th percentile. The risk to watch is a client rendered app that ships so much JavaScript the caching benefit is spent before it arrives.

Usually yes, and it is normally an addition rather than a rebuild. The work is adding a manifest, implementing a service worker with a caching strategy that suits your content, making sure the site is served entirely over HTTPS, and confirming the interface genuinely works at small sizes and on touch. The honest constraint is that a slow site does not become fast by becoming installable. If the underlying pages are heavy, we would fix that first, because caching a slow experience mostly means serving the slow experience more reliably rather than improving it.