I had the opportunity to meet a Google employee who worked in sales. Her job was specifically working with big ad spenders and helping them develop the company so essentially they would spend more ads on Google. I of course love this conversation because she is essentially the concierge service to the high rollers and instead of us asking Google, “what do you want us to do?” Her job was to tell these big spenders, “You should do this.” It is a really interesting dynamic in my opinion to be in that position and have access to the next level of data. Anyway I am geeking out, and feel like I was getting to peak behind the curtain.
Our conversation talked a little bit about website development and competing with companies that are offering free sites or very inexpensive websites. I pointed out “owning your data,” and she immediately agreed with me (woo hoo we are talking and agreeing… I will be invited to Google Campus any second now). Then she brings up Progressive Web Based Applications. Now while I have heard this term before not sure I actually spent much time looking into it, mostly because in my opinion I am not sure it makes sense because it only works in Chrome and you still need some sort of network. Those are really the only two cons though. It essentially uses a web app manifest file and you can still do push notifications… this means it looks and acts like an app when really all it takes is a book mark. You can even set a book mark on your phone home screen like an app (Android only… another con I guess), but without having to go to an app store. The developer controls what is cached and this means you can make it run really fast but you will need some sort of network to run this as opposed to apps that are running natively on your device.
So here is my opinion on all of this. I think it is great in the sense that it makes it easier for potential customers to access your site in “app” form without actually downloading an app and taking up nearly as much space as an app, but I am just not sure people will do this yet. Maybe in certain instances or industries this would be a better solution (looking at you Facebook) because some of these apps need a network anyway to be useful and currently take up so much space. However for your regular services or product companies I am not sure this would be a good use of your development time. You may be more interested in spending time on Google AMP (which I will talk about and link to later).
Info taken from: https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/