Progressive Web Apps and other mobile developing techniques: a comparison

Abstract: Developing an app for Android and iOS traditionally requires you to build two different versions. This is both costly and time consuming, which has led to the creation of many Cross-platform alternatives. One such alternative is to use a Progressive Web App (PWA). They are built like regular Web apps and include features previously unique to Native apps. Our focus is to compare PWAs to other Cross-platform solutions by measuring the performance of a PWA, Web app and Cordova app. Terms in the ecosystem are clarified due to inconsistencies, and the process of converting a Web app into a PWA is described. The measurements showed that the PWA and Cordova app had almost equal overall performance, and they were both faster than the Web app. This indicates that PWAs are a viable Cross-platform alternative, but more quantitative studies with performance in focus needs to be conducted due to the small scale of this work. Other aspects of PWAs also needs to be evaluated, such as app size and ease of development.