Progressive Web Apps are user experiences that have the reach of the web, and are:

  • Reliable – Load instantly and never show the downasaur, even in uncertain network conditions.
  • Fast – Respond quickly to user interactions with silky smooth animations and no janky scrolling.
  • Engaging – Feel like a natural app on the device, with an immersive user experience.

This new level of quality allows Progressive Web Apps to earn a place on the user’s home screen.

Reliable

When launched from the user’s home screen, service workers enable a Progressive Web App to load instantly, regardless of the network state.

A service worker, written in JavaScript, is like a client-side proxy and puts you in control of the cache and how to respond to resource requests. By pre-caching key resources you can eliminate the dependence on the network, ensuring an instant and reliable experience for your users.

Fast

53% of users will abandon a site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load! And once loaded, users expect them to be fast—no janky scrolling or slow-to-respond interfaces.

Engaging

Progressive Web Apps are installable and live on the user’s home screen, without the need for an app store. They offer an immersive full screen experience with help from a web app manifest file and can even re-engage users with web push notifications.

The Web App Manifest allows you to control how your app appears and how it’s launched. You can specify home screen icons, the page to load when the app is launched, screen orientation, and even whether or not to show the browser chrome.

Why build a Progressive Web App?

Building a high-quality Progressive Web App has incredible benefits, making it easy to delight your users, grow engagement and increase conversions.

  • Increased engagement
    Web push notifications helped eXtra Electronics increase engagement by 4X. And those users spend twice as much time on the site.
  • Improved conversions
    The ability to deliver an amazing user experience helped AliExpress improve conversions for new users across all browsers by 104% and on iOS by 82%.

Lighthouse

Lighthouse, an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of your Progressive Web Apps, eliminates much of the manual testing that was previously required. You can even use Lighthouse in continuous integration systems to catch regressions.

Dive Deeper

  • Progressive Web Apps on Desktop 
    Progressive Web Apps now work on the desktop, including Chrome OS and Windows, with support for Mac and Linux coming soon.
  • App Install Banners 
    Chrome uses a set of criteria and visit frequency heuristics to determine when to show the banner.
  • Lighthouse 
    Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of your web apps.
  • Get Support 
    Get your questions answered on Stack Overflow.

Start developing today

Write your first Progressive Web App with our step-by-step code lab.