What are Progressive Web Apps?

So let's dive into progressive web web apps by answering one important question first, what are progressive web apps? It's a term which you might have heard already but sometimes it's hard to really say what it means, in the end progressive web apps is just a term referring to a couple of features you can add to any web application, to any web page running in the browser therefore to enhance it. This is what progressive web apps in the end are about - you progressively enhance your existing web pages to feel and work more like native mobile apps. I'm not just talking about responsive design, so that it looks good on both devices, we're doing that since a couple of years already or you should be at least, I'm talking about other things you know from native mobile apps, like your app working if you're offline, it's having an icon on the home screen, things like accessing the device camera or the location, synchronizing data in the background. These are all features which were hard to do in web applications in the past, nowadays we got browser support in a lot of browsers for that and we can therefore use that. Now in this course, I will show you how to use all these technologies which make up a progressive web app and of course I'll also explain which technologies these are and I will show you how to implement them in a way that it also works on older browsers, that your web page still works on older browsers because that's the core thing, you progressively enhance a web application. It's not an all or nothing move, it's not like it doesn't work on older browsers anymore, it just means if you have a modern browser on a mobile device, you get an awesome experience otherwise you'll get the experience you've gotten anyways. There are three main words I'd say but which you can summarize progressive web apps - they should be reliable which means they should load fast and even work if you're offline, at least a part of the application should work if you're offline. Now this is really a core thing of progressive web apps, we're talking a lot about that initial load, the first time you visit an application when you open it because if you consider an application running on your mobile device, most of them start up pretty fast, so long loading times you don't want that. Additionally it should be fast, not just during load up but also once it runs, it should react to user input, it should provide animations, it should be able to access native device features in an intuitive way and we also want to make sure that it's engaging. We want to get our users back into the app, we want to offer features like push notifications to inform them even if the application is closed, yes you heard that correctly, this is what you can do and what we will do in this course. So that is what makes up a progressive web app. Now why would we want to build one? Obviously we have some good arguments here but couldn't we achieve the same by just building a normal mobile app with Java, Android or with Swift Objective-C? Well, let's find out which arguments speak for a web app instead of a native mobile app.