You can read again and again: PWAs are on the advance or the app model of the future. But what exactly is meant by the term “Progressive Web App” falls by the wayside, as so often with buzzwords in the industry. What makes it so special? Wikipedia says, “A Progressive Web App (PWA) is a website that has many features that were previously only available for native apps.” A PWA is designed to make the Web more native. It combines the advantages of web applications and native apps such as offline use, short loading times and much more.
It’s highly likely that you’ve already used a Progressive Web App yourself. One feature, for example, would be the Add-to-Homescreen button, which allows you to download the web application directly from the browser to your homescreen.
Progressive Web Apps are widely known, but it’s worth taking a closer look at this buzzword. We asked our expert Markus Schütz. Markus is a software developer at Anexia and works on PWA customer projects. We asked him to tell us under which conditions you should decide for a Progressive Web App, what makes offline use possible, how PWAs differ from native apps and much more. You can hear his answers in this video (only in German):