Last week, I spoke at
#Frontkon, Brno, Czech Republic, about the state of Progressive Web Apps (PWA), and again, I was amazed at how many available features are not used in web apps because people are simply unaware of them.
I spoke to many developers who were highly surprised about what is currently possible with web apps.
PWAs are a viable and cost-effective alternative to native apps. You only need one codebase to deploy an app on iOS, Android, and desktop and they can be freely distributed on the web without any app store dependencies.
Web apps can work offline for almost a decade now, yet most web apps don't.
Companies even sabotage their own web apps by making them dumbed-down versions of their native apps that only serve to promote their native counterparts.
Why?
Because many companies simply don't know or don't care. They think web apps are "not good enough" and quite frankly, I can't blame them.
Companies like X and Instagram have PWAs that don't even use half of the features available to them and that don't even work offline (while they can!)
So if they can't even do it, web apps must be bad, right?
Wrong.
Web apps can be so much better, but if even big companies don't bother, the smaller ones won't either.
I've made it my mission to educate and show what web apps are capable of (see
whatpwacando.today) but without the support of big companies, the adoption of PWAs will have a long way to go.
We need more big companies to invest in web apps to show what is possible. It's in our joint interest to break free from the chains of app stores that can end your business whenever they want by kicking your app out of their stores.
These walled gardens shouldn't decide whether or not your business is allowed to compete. We should be allowed to deploy fully functional web apps that are not crippled by tech companies that deliberately hold back features to benefit the apps in their app stores.
That is what my mission is about.