On June 10, 2017, GMTC 2017 opened, and only Michael, an engineer from Google, shared a keynote speech entitled “PWA: The Present and Future of mobile Web”. No lecturer in China shared PWA-related technologies.
One year later, on June 21, 2018, GMTC 2018 set up a PWA special performance, The lecturers from Ali, Meituan-Dianping and Baidu respectively shared their speeches with the themes of “Practice and Influence of PWA Technology in Ali System from the perspective of UC kernel”, “Practice and Exploration of Cross-container High-performance Offline Solution in Meituan”, and “Improving Performance and User Perception Experience by Using App Shell Model in PWA”.
Compared with GMTC 2017, PWA has entered the technology application stage in China, as can be seen from the content shared this year and the feedback from the audience.
PWA development at home and abroad
From GMTC 2017 to GMTC 2018, PWA has made great progress both at home and abroad.
Foreign development
At The Google I/O conference in May, Google mentioned PWA in almost every Web-related presentation. With Google’s strong push, there are already quite a few overseas sites with PWA independence. Starbucks is a typical example of independent PWA site strongly promoted by Google. The overseas Starbucks official website has been transformed by PWA, and the daily activity and monthly activity have increased twice!
At Google’s Chrome Dev Summit in 2017, they proposed another meaning for PWA as an independent form: Progressive Web Apps are just a higher bar for user experience. According to Google, the average site conversion rate increases by more than 20% after changing PWA! This increase in conversion rates demonstrates PWA’s ability to enhance the Web experience.
Domestic development
The development of PWA in China is relatively slow. At present, there is no mature independent site similar to foreign “PWA site”, but “technology without borders”, pWA-related technology has been applied to some cutting-edge Internet companies in China.
PWA has brought new solutions in performance optimization. Yu Qiu from Meituan-Dianping mentioned in GMTC speech that after iterating the payment business with Service Worker, the performance has improved by 22% and the payment conversion rate has increased by 1%-2%. The lecturer also mentioned that Service workers are standardized technical solutions, not “dark magic”, so don’t worry too much about cross-platform issues. From the popularity of on-site q&A and offline communication, we can see that the effectiveness of Service Worker on performance optimization has been recognized by domestic front-end technicians.
PWA not only improves the performance experience, but also deserves our attention in user perception. App Shell solves the problems of poor experience such as white screen of Web page jump and waiting, bringing users a complete site experience. Baidu lecturer Pan Yuqi brought App Shell related sharing. In her speech, Yuqi mentioned two advantages of using APP Shell:
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Performance: The App Shell model can be used to separate the common resources from the dynamic content to achieve a fast response to user access;
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Experience: App Shell enables Web App to have smooth interactive experience after every click feedback of Native App.
Recently, the Web site of Xiaomi Shopping mall uses the interactive effect of App Shell, and people can visit the official website of Xiaomi on their mobile browsers to experience it. The official website of Baidu’s open source technology Lavas also uses App Shell. Click [read the original text] to experience the effect, and you can also see the same technical solution.
Service Worker and App Shell have already had application examples in China, and there have been a variety of typical sites for Web performance, browsing and interactive experience. So why has the independent form of the PWA been so slow to emerge? When will standalone applications with “Add Web site to desktop” and “Web Push” messaging come? This may be a question for content, service distribution platforms and vendors. As front-end developers and Internet practitioners look forward to early answers.
PWA compatibility
Safari supported PWA-related features in iOS 11.3, which was released in March. By now, almost all major browsers have supported PWA-related features.
Current browsers that support PWA-related features
conclusion
Currently, we are experiencing new changes in the mobile Web brought by PWA that will greatly improve the user experience of browsing and interacting. With experience as the foundation and the world’s top technology developers doing technology iterations, we have reason to believe that the Web ecosystem with a large number of traffic and user groups will have a greater space for development.
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