FacebookFeed- A demo app Implements limited feature of Facebook using PWA!
As we look deep into 2018, one of the questions on every Web developer’s mind ought to be, “What trend will define the web in 2018?”. From 2013 being dubbed the “Year of Responsive Web Design” and Google’s announced Mobilegeddon in April 2015 when they started to boost the rankings of mobile-friendly websites in mobile search results, to 2016 when Accelerated Mobile Pages got introduced and 2017 when progressive web apps started being supported by the Chrome browser, the Web technology evolved in a spectacular way and so did the businesses that knew how to take advantage of the newer trends.
WHAT ARE PROGRESSIVE WEB APPS?
Progressive Web Apps (PWA) are experiences that combine the best of the web and the best of apps. Native app store apps have become hugely popular in the past through features such as push notifications, working offline, smooth animations and transitions, loading on the homescreen and so on. Mobile Web Apps are JavaScript applications that work in the browser and attempted to bring some of the native apps features to the web, but weren’t able to provide push notifications for example.
With the mobile introduction of new Web APIs, Progressive Web Apps are now closing the gap, providing the full app-like experience on the mobile web. A lot of attention has been paid to progressive web apps lately, and we couldn’t miss the chance to analyze how many of the URLs we scrutinized (over 5,000 e-commerce websites from Alexa) support any of the main characteristics of progressive web apps: HTTPS, Offline mode, Web push notifications, “Add to Home Screen” prompts.
Today, progressive web apps are fully supported by Chrome and Opera. Firefox supports nearly all of their features. Microsoft Edge is working on them. The Samsung Internet browser has been making great strides this past year and has shown a strong commitment to progressive web apps, as demonstrated by Samsung’s leadership in some of the key standardization work. Apple has finally jumped on the mobile web train: service workers, a key component for supporting progressive web apps, are available in Safari 11.1 for iOS 11.3 and macOS 10.13.4.
AVERAGE PROGRESSIVE WEB APP SCORE FOR E-COMMERCE SEGMENT IS 40/100
Out of the top 5,000 e-commerce websites we studied (see below details on the methodology), 58% of them scored between 40 and 60 out of 100 on LightHouse, 41% below 40 and approximately 1% over 60.
To put things into perspective, back in 2015, by the time Google expanded the use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal (in fact penalizing all sites that don’t have a mobile strategy), 40% of the researched sites had NO mobile web strategy whatsoever!
Obviously, this is not a satisfactory score and the main reasons lie in the fact that less than 2% have a service worker installed or a manifest file in place. In essence, the majority of e-commerce websites are still missing one or more of the key progressive web app features such as offline mode, push notifications or add to homescreen.
On the other hand, what’s interesting is the increase in HTTPS usage from previous years (25%) to 75%. What started in 2014 when Google announced HTTPS as a ranking signal had a more aggressive follow-up in 2016 when they announced that beginning January 2017 (Chrome 56), they’ll mark HTTP pages that collect passwords or credit cards as non-secure, as part of a long-term plan to mark all HTTP sites as non-secure.