Progressive Web Apps: The Possible Web-native Uniﬁer for Mobile

Development

Andreas Biørn-Hansen

, Tim A. Majchrzak

and Tor-Morten Grønli

Faculty of Technology, Westerdals Oslo ACT, Christian Krohgs gate 32, 0186, Oslo, Norway

ERCIS, University of Agder, Gimlemoen 25, 4630, Kristiansand, Norway

Keywords:

Progressive Web Apps, Service Workers, Cross-platform, Cross-platform Development, Mobile Web.

Abstract:

A recent advancement of the mobile web has enabled features previously only found in natively developed apps.

Thus, arduous development for several platforms or using cross-platform approaches was required. The novel

approach, coined Progressive Web Apps, can be implemented through a set of concepts and technologies on any

web site that meets certain requirements. In this paper, we argue for progressive web apps as a possibly unifying

technology for web apps and native apps. After an introduction of features, we scrutinize the performance. Two

cross-platform mobile apps and one Progressive Web App have been developed for comparison purposes, and

provided in an open source repository for results’ validity veriﬁcation. We aim to spark interest in the academic

community, as a lack of academic involvement was identiﬁed as part of the literature search.

1 INTRODUCTION

In traditional mobile application development,

reusability of code between native apps, the web, and

mobile platforms has been inherently non-existent.

This is due to native apps’ non-interoperable code

bases, resulting in separate projects and developer envi-

ronments when support for multiple mobile platforms

and operating systems is desired (Heitk

otter et al.,

2013; Perchat et al., 2013; Majchrzak and Heitk

otter,

2014).

For companies without the resources or the willing-

ness to employ specialized mobile developers for each

targeted platform, cross-platform development has be-

come a popular alternative (Malavolta et al., 2015b). It

typically not only reduces the development effort but

also enables a quicker time-to-market (Rahul and To-

lety, 2012). While its application and reputation varies

in academia and industry communities (Puvvala et al.,

2016; Mercado et al., 2016), the idea of a single code

base – which can be deployed to multiple platforms –

is seen as appealing for a variety of reasons. These in-

clude, but are not limited to, budget, human resources,

and existing knowledge (Corral et al., 2012).

There are multiple approaches to cross-platform

development (Heitk

otter et al., 2012; Rieger and Ma-

jchrzak, 2016). In addition, a plethora of technical

frameworks to support such development are either

freely available under open source licenses, or as paid

proprietary products. Examples of popular frame-

works include Ionic Framework, PhoneGap, React Na-

tive and Xamarin (cf. Majchrzak et al. (2017)). Coin-

cidentally these frameworks also represent three tech-

nologically distinctive approaches (Majchrzak et al.,

2017).

Ionic Framework and PhoneGap both belong to

the web- and Cordova-based hybrid approach, where

user interface components are solely structured and

styled using web technologies including HTML and

CSS. React Native, of the interpreted approach, does

not depend on a web-view as it instead leverages an on-

device JavaScript interpreter along with native bridges,

resulting in native interface components instead of

web-based HTML components. Xamarin’s approach

is commonly referred to as cross-compilation as it

compiles C# into native binaries for each supported

platform. This results in native apps that are not depen-

dant on interpreters or web-views (Latif et al., 2016).

This can also be referred to as truly native (cf. also

Heitk

otter et al. (2013)).

Until recently, the web platform lagged behind on

mobile-centred innovation in terms of being capable of

competing with native or cross-platform apps (Puder

et al., 2014). A new set of standards advocated by

the Google Web Fundamentals group seeks to bridge

that gap by introducing features such as ofﬂine support,

background synchronisation, and home-screen installa-

tion to the web. The approach is known as Progressive

344

Biørn-Hansen, A., Majchrzak, T. and Grønli, T-M.

Progressive Web Apps: The Possible Web-native Uniﬁer for Mobile Development.

DOI: 10.5220/0006353703440351

In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST 2017), pages 344-351

ISBN: 978-989-758-246-2

Web Apps (PWA), a term coined by Russel and Ber-

riman (2015) in a blog post covering initial design

ideas. PWAs are deﬁned by a set of concepts and key-

words including progressive, responsive, connectivity

independent, app-like, fresh, safe, discoverable, re-

engageable, installable, and linkable (Osmani, 2015).

These are PWA’s contributions to the uniﬁcation of the

mobile experience, where web apps can be installed

and distributed without app marketplaces, work with-

out Internet connectivity, receive push notiﬁcations

and look like regular apps. This is possible due to

the

Service Worker

API which empowers develop-

ers through the use of a background-executed script

acting as a network and device proxy.

While the industry shows investment and interest

in progressive web apps, a lack of academic research

on the topic was identiﬁed as part of the theory search.

Consequently, there is a substantial research poten-

tial, further discussed in section 6.2. This article aim

to provide an introduction to the concepts and tech-

nologies behind progressive web apps. Moreover, it

seeks to showcase features and to provide a technical

comparison. These steps should help demystify and

scrutinize the above compiled list of buzz terms for

PWAs. Three technical artefacts in the form of mobile

apps were developed using the Hybrid, Interpreted and

PWA approaches. A comparison of start-up speeds,

app sizes and render speeds is also provided as part of

this article.

This position paper is structured as follows. Sec-

tion 2 introduces our research methods. Related work

is then compiled in Section 3. The results of our work

with PWAs are compiled in Section 4. In Section 5 we

discuss our ﬁndings. Eventually we draw a conclusion

and point out to future work in Section 6.

2 RESEARCH METHODS

2.1 Literature Search

Initial searches for academic involvement in progres-

sive web apps returned a limited amount of results per

January 2017. A search for

Progressive Web Apps

on Google Scholar resulted in two theses, a keynote

paper for the Mobile! conference and an IEEE paper

on web app launch times.

Using the same search query, the Taylor & Francis

Online article database returned zero results; as did

ScienceDirect. The ACM Digital Library returned the

aforementioned keynote paper. IEEE Xplore contained

the aforementioned launch time paper, which merely

mentions PWA (Gudla et al., 2016).

A ResearchGate search covers both publications

and questions on their website, but it rendered no rele-

vant results. Academic contributions are, per January

2017, virtually non-existent or not visible nor ﬁndable

in the search engines explored.

An unknown base of research was identiﬁed for

Service Workers. Searches for

Service Workers

among the aforementioned databases returned vari-

ous results not constrained to computer science, but

also within child care and the public sector. Other

combined phrases, such as

{Service Workers

web

API}

did manage to ﬁlter the outcome to a certain

degree, still polluted with irrelevant results.

2.2 Design Implementation

To gain better understanding of the possibilities of pro-

gressive web apps, three technical artefacts were de-

veloped for comparison. An hybrid app was developed

using the Ionic Framework. An interpreted app was de-

veloped using React Native. Lastly, a progressive Web

App was developed using React.js. As our main aim

is to introduce PWA as a concept together with some

technical and higher-level comparisons, we excluded

the aforementioned cross-compilation approach from

our study.

The applications employ a master-detail navigation

pattern, where the master view presents a list of click-

able items fetched from an API. Upon list item click,

the app navigates to the detail view, displaying the

item image together with its author and title. The data

is fetched from www.reddit.com/r/Art/.json.

All three technical artefacts have been open-

sourced

to allow veriﬁcation of the results. The arte-

facts are depicted in Figures 1, 2 and 3 (see p. 3).

2.3 Performance Testing

Three variables were included as part of the perfor-

mance test. The tests were conducted on a Google

Nexus 5X device running Android version 7.0. The

aim was to gather initial data on differences in per-

formance between the implementations discussed in

Subsection 2.2.

Size of installation.

Information regarding app

size was found at the following path on the Android

device: Settings – Apps – [app name].

Activity launch time.

This was mea-

sured using the Android Debug Bridge and its

am activity launch time

command. This mea-

sures the time it takes to launch the ﬁrst activity of an

application. The test was conducted ten times for each

https://github.com/andreasbhansen/pwa-paper

Progressive Web Apps: The Possible Web-native Uniﬁer for Mobile Development

345

Figure 1: The Ionic Framework Hybrid app.

Figure 2: The React Native Interpreted app.

app as the results rendered different at each run. The

average time is presented as result.

Time From App-icon Tap to Toolbar Render.

As no suitable method for measuring elapsed time

from app-icon tap to user interface toolbar render was

identiﬁed, an online stop watch was used. The tool-

bar, titled ”Art by Reddit”, is displayed in Figures 1-3.

In our applications, this element is the ﬁrst to be ren-

dered to the screen, thus we used it as the basis for our

render-time measurement. As the measurement relied

on human reactions, and is thus inherently error-prone,

the test was conducted ten times for each app, and the

average time is presented as result.

3 RELATED WORK

While the lack of academic involvement and research

on progressive web apps is evident from the literature

search, an established industry-oriented body of knowl-

Figure 3: The Progressive Web App.

edge was identiﬁed. The Google Web Fundamentals

group acted as the driving force for the creation and

publishing of tutorials and blog posts. Until a solid

academic knowledge-base is developed, the Web Fun-

damentals web site should, thus, be the foundation for

upcoming research.

Other than Google-created content, two early-

access books were identiﬁed (Ater, 2017; Hume, 2017)

together with an extensive pool of industry articles.

Examples of topics covered are fundamental concepts

(Edwards, 2016), challenges and concerns (Mahemoff,

2016), and thoughts on the impact of web innova-

tion (Rinaldi et al., 2016). A notably larger aca-

demic foundation was found for the other app devel-

opment approaches discussed. Numerous papers on

cross-platform app development and underlying ap-

proaches have previously been identiﬁed. Papers found

to often recur in related research includes Heitk

otter

et al. (2012), Xanthopoulos and Xinogalos (2013),

Dalmasso et al. (2013), and Palmieri et al. (2012).

They make up the theoretical foundation and early re-

search, which newer papers draw from. Their topics

range from comparisons of technical frameworks and

approaches, to classiﬁcations and performance mea-

surements.

Recent research identiﬁed includes, but is not lim-

ited to, topics such as requirements for cross-platform

tooling (Gaouar et al., 2016), development approach

evaluation frameworks (Rieger and Majchrzak, 2016),

energy consumption comparisons (Ciman and Gaggi,

2016), and end-user perception of cross-platform apps

(Mercado et al., 2016; Malavolta et al., 2015a). Their

contributions should be acknowledged as important

foundation for future research on progressive web

apps.

Due to the lack of academic contributions regard-

ing PWA, the keen industry interest should act as a

WEBIST 2017 - 13th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies

346

catalyst for further research and more academic in-

volvement. Research suggestions are presented in

Section 6 in an attempt to spark interest in relevant

research communities.

4 RESULTS

4.1 Feature Comparison

This section seeks to provide insights into differences

between interpreted apps, progressive web apps, hy-

brid apps and native apps by comparing a set of fea-

tures and concepts. It also presents insights on such as

technical frameworks and experience-uniﬁcation for

end-users.

Table 1 provides a non-exhaustive list of feature

available in PWAs as of January 2017, along with their

compatibility. Remarks follow subsequently.

Table 1: Feature-comparison of approaches.

Feature Interpreted PWA Hybrid Native

Installable Yes Yes

Yes Yes

Ofﬂine capable Yes Yes Yes Yes

Testable before in-

stallation

No Yes No No

App marketplace

availability

Yes Yes

Push notiﬁcations Yes Yes

Yes Yes

Cross-platform

availability

Yes Limited

Yes No

Hardware and Plat-

form API access

Yes Limited

Yes

Background syn-

chronisation

Yes Yes Yes Yes

(a) The

Enable improved add to Home

screen

developer ﬂag in Chrome Canary for Android

can be enabled in order for PWAs to be installed like

normal apps (Joreteg, 2016).

(b) PWAs will be made searchable from the Win-

dows 10 app marketplace, thus becoming “ﬁrst-class

citizens” of their app ecosystem (Rossi, 2016).

Push

API

is available, but limited to certain browsers.

(d) As Apple’s Safari browser does not yet support

the Service Workers API, the iOS platform is yet to

fully realise and leverage the potential of the techno-

logical advancement.

(e) A PWA can use HTML5-based APIs for hard-

ware and platform access in addition to features and

functionality made possible by Service Workers.

(f) Hardware and platform access for Hybrid apps

is usually provided by Cordova, a library for handling

https://www.w3.org/TR/push-api/

the bridging between a native app’s web-view compo-

nent and the device’s APIs.

4.2 Technologies and Concepts

4.2.1 Framework Agnostic

A plethora of frameworks for web development exists

(Smeets and Aerts, 2016). The Web Fundamentals

group demonstrated framework agnosticity by imple-

menting PWAs in three different frameworks (Osmani,

2015).

4.2.2 Service Workers

The Service Worker

is responsible for most of the core

features associated with progressive web apps (Gaunt,

2016). A PWA cannot properly work in browsers

without Service Worker support. The worker is reg-

istered on a user’s ﬁrst page visit. It consists of a

JavaScript ﬁle embodying lifecycle hooks for business

logic and cache control. It can be used to handle tasks

such as background synchronisation (Archibald, 2016),

caching mechanisms for data and application shell, as

well as interception of network requests (Osmani and

Gaunt, 2017).

4.2.3 Application Shell

The application shell is deﬁned by the Google Web

Fundamentals group as “[...] the minimal HTML, CSS,

and JavaScript powering a user interface.” Osmani and

Gaunt (2017). They list three criteria for the shell: fast

loading time, cached, and displaying dynamic content.

Data is pulled from external APIs.

4.2.4 Web App Manifest

The purpose of the manifest ﬁle is to expose certain

modiﬁable settings to app developers. These settings

include such as logo image path, app name, splash

screen and more. In short, the manifest can be used to

modify behaviour and style of PWA applications.

4.2.5 Security through HTTPS

For security reasons, HTTPS is required for a Service

Worker to register in the browser and accordingly act

on events (Gaunt, 2016). The reason for enforced se-

curity is described by Gaunt (2016), as using the “[...]

service worker you can hijack connections, fabricate,

and ﬁlter responses”.

https://www.w3.org/TR/service-workers/

Progressive Web Apps: The Possible Web-native Uniﬁer for Mobile Development

347

Figure 4: PWA installation ﬂow in Chrome Canary.

4.3 Uniﬁcation of Mobile App and Web

Experiences

An evident difference between web apps and regu-

lar mobile apps is their explorability. A regular app

requires search and installation via an app market-

place. Progressive web apps enable the best of both

approaches, where end-users can easily experience an

application through their web browser, then choose to

install it via an “Add to Home screen” banner prompted

(see Figure 4). The banner will only be prompted to

the user if certain qualiﬁcations are met (Pedersen,

2016). Figure 4 illustrates the installation process for

the PWA designed and implemented for this paper

(cropped screenshots).

The illustrated experience is per January 2017

only achievable by enabling the

Improved PWA

Installation

ﬂag in the Chrome Canary for Android

settings. Without that ﬂag enabled, the experience is

comparable to bookmarking a site to the home screen.

Together with the full-screen experience of pro-

gressive web apps, the installation prompt can be con-

sidered an advance in uniﬁcation of end-user experi-

ence and mobile web perception. Instead of forcing

users to download an app from a marketplace, they

can experience the product in their web browser as a

regular website before installing it via the banner. As

we discuss in our list of suggestions for future work,

research on potential privacy and security concerns in

this regard should be of interest to all parties.

4.4 Measurement Comparison between

PWA, Interpreted and Hybrid Apps

Table 2 presents a comparison of three different mea-

surements: installation size, launch time and render

time. The installation size of the progressive web app

is about 157 times smaller than the React Native-based

interpreted app, and about 43 times smaller than the

Ionic Framework-based hybrid app. Where the hy-

brid app used more than 9 seconds to render the app’s

toolbar, the interpreted app used around 860ms on the

same task. The PWA rendered different results when

(a) Chrome Canary did not run in the background, and

(b) it did run in the background, regardless of open

website. This is due to PWA’s browser dependency.

Table 2: Measurement-comparison of approaches.

Measure Hybrid Interpreted PWA

Size of installation 4.53MB 16.39MB 104KB

Launch time 860ms 246ms 230ms

Time from app-icon 9242.1ms 862ms (a) 3152ms

tap to toolbar render (b) 1319ms

5 DISCUSSION

5.1 Basics

From the perspective of web-native uniﬁcation, there

are certain major limitations to the PWA approach

compared to hybrid, interpreted and native apps. We

use this section to spark interest by elaborating on a set

of these limitations based on our ﬁndings, and suggest

that future research dives deeper into this regard.

As discussed by Malavolta (2016), a PWA cannot

access hardware- and platform-level features not sup-

ported by the respective browser. Examples of such

non-included features are native calendar and contact

list access. However, an increasing pool of platform

APIs are becoming available in newer browsers.

For progressive web apps to have the same poten-

tial as cross-platform app development, support for

Service Workers

in Apple’s iOS Safari browser is a

requirement. Without such support, a PWA-enabled

website would not deliver a consistent experience

across browsers and platforms.

5.2 Feature Comparison

Table 1 highlighted differences in feature compatibil-

ity between approaches for app development. There

are certain profound differences between them, some

being inherent characteristics.

PWAs are the only option among the listed ap-

proaches that naturally enables testing of an app before

installation, due to being accessible in web browsers.

If app marketplace presence is required, the three other

approaches fully supports such, with a potential PWA

entry into the Microsoft app store.

Ofﬂine capabilities, push notiﬁcations and back-

ground synchronisation are available regardless of ap-

proach. Cross-platform compatibility is found in the

interpreted, hybrid and PWA approaches, the latter

WEBIST 2017 - 13th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies

348

with some limitations. As mentioned, this is one of

the main reasons why cross-platform approaches have

become popular alternatives to native development.

For apps relying on features not found in or requir-

ing performance not achievable in a current browser,

the alternative approaches are more suitable. The three

artefacts developed as part of this paper are limited

in terms of device-platform communication require-

ments, as they do not require any APIs other than

those commonly found in browsers. Progressive web

apps are constrained to platform APIs made available

through the browser, thus relying on W3C and browser

vendors (Puder et al., 2014).

5.3 Measurement Comparison

Table 2 presented the results from three measurements

conducted for preliminary data gathering. It thereby

also provides an anchor for further research.

The results render the presence of certain trade-offs.

While the interpreted app installation size is 157 times

larger, it is also more than 3.5 times faster to render

meaningful content compared to the progressive web

app when launching the latter without having Chrome

running in the background. If launched with Chrome

already running, the gap between the two apps was

down to 457ms, still favouring the interpreted one.

The differences are more remarkable when com-

paring the interpreted app to the hybrid one, with the

latter using 10 times longer to render the toolbar. It is

worth noting that the hybrid app framework, Ionic 2,

was in beta release at the time of implementation, thus,

the render-time could be affected by this. However,

the code-base was built using production settings, as

recommended by the documentation. Thus, we made

efforts to mitigate and understand the render-time.

The presented results are limited in that the apps

were only tested on one speciﬁc device, the Google

Nexus 5X, running Android 7.0. The conducted tests

do not build on previous research or established meth-

ods for measuring performance. The purpose of the

tests was to gather and present preliminary results to

spark interest for further work. The named limitations

are owed to the very early stage of work on the topic;

in fact, our mitigation of limitations is even beyond a

typical position paper already.

6 CONCLUSION AND FURTHER

WORK

6.1 Conclusion

The industry is investing resources into progressive

web apps (PWA) and the development of learning ma-

terial. The lack of academic involvement denotes a

signiﬁcant knowledge gap but at the same time pro-

vides research potential. This paper is an effort to raise

awareness of PWA in the academic community by

contributing with an introduction to the concepts and

technologies, comparison of feature and measurement

against established approaches, open source artefacts

for result veriﬁcation, and suggestions for further re-

search.

Per January 2017, the Google Web Fundamentals

group is one of the leading driving forces behind advo-

cacy of PWAs. They could be considered as the main

publisher of learning material.

The current state of progressive web apps involves

a lack of certain hardware and platform APIs and fea-

tures that only (certain) cross-platform and native apps

can access. Recent browser advancements have been

forces of uniﬁcation for the end-user app experience,

including, but not limited to, installable and native-

looking web apps through PWAs. While Chrome is

leading the way for PWA browser support, Apple’s iOS

Safari is yet to support the necessary Service Worker

API.

We ﬁnd that there is much potential for PWAs to

become a uniﬁer for web-native development without

the use of cross-platform frameworks. As an end-user,

the PWA installation process becomes more similar

to regular apps through new advancements in user ex-

perience aspects. Web apps can look, feel and act

similar to native, hybrid and interpreted apps. While

there are hardware and platform API limitations to

PWAs not found in the other approaches, product re-

quirements and speciﬁcations will in the end be the

deciding factor for choice of approach. We would

like to conclude with an encouraging note, a quote by

Archibald (2016) from the 2016 Google I/O Confer-

ence: “We want everything that ends up on the home

screen to be competitive with native apps. We want to

make the web a ﬁrst-class part of the operating system

in the user’s mind”.

6.2 Suggestions for Further Work

One can possibly apply research questions from cross-

platform, native, and mobile web app development

to research on progressive web apps. This results in

a vast and existing knowledge base that can be used

Progressive Web Apps: The Possible Web-native Uniﬁer for Mobile Development

349

as the foundation for PWA and next-generation web

research.

The list below provides suggestions for further re-

search of technical, economical, and sociological na-

ture:

•

Continue the development of technical implemen-

tations for comparison and evaluation purposes

against established development approaches.

•

In terms of social and economic aspects, look into

challenges such as mobile data fees in develop-

ing countries and associated costs in downloading

marketplace apps compared to progressive web

apps.

•

Study the impact of “Add to Home screen” versus

installation of apps through the app marketplace.

Are users more willing to install a PWA as they

can test it beforehand? Will ad-hoc usage and

installation eventually merge?

•

App marketplaces are constrained and deliver a

certain degree of security. Does the potential lack

of such constraints impact the user’s choice of

installing a PWA?

•

Are there security and privacy risks newly intro-

duced with PWAs?

•

Look into possible sales models for progressive

web apps, which currently disturbs the established

app marketplaces.

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