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When your business needs a PWA

Installation and offline access can be useful, but they should solve a specific problem for your customers or team.

Updated 2 min readueb.al Development #PWA #Performance #Technology
When your business needs a PWA
Photo by William Hook

Part of the series: Under the Hood

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Contents

A field worker needs yesterday’s job details in a building with no signal. A customer wants to reopen a ticket without searching through email. These are useful starting points for a Progressive Web App, or PWA.

A PWA is a web application that can offer features such as installation, cached content and notifications. Support varies by browser and device; those features need to be designed and tested individually.

What you can add to a website

  • Installation: supported browsers can add the app to the home screen or desktop. The installation steps differ across platforms.
  • Offline access: a service worker can serve previously saved content. It does not make every page or feature work offline automatically.
  • Notifications: where supported, users can opt in to updates. These should have a clear purpose, such as a booking reminder.
  • Device features: camera and location access may be available with permission. Check support on the devices your users have.

The MDN PWA documentation covers these capabilities and their requirements.

Decide what happens without a connection

Reading a saved timetable is straightforward. Editing stock records offline takes more planning. The app needs to distinguish changes saved on the device from changes accepted by the server.

For each offline action, decide:

  1. Which information can be stored on the device, and for how long?
  2. How will users know whether a change has been sent?
  3. What happens if two people edit the same record?
  4. How can a failed submission be retried without creating duplicates?
  5. What should be removed when someone signs out?

These questions often matter more than the installation button. Our SaaS case study discusses offline work in more detail.

Costs and limits

Sharing web code can reduce duplicated development. It does not eliminate device testing, accessibility work, backend costs or maintenance. Native and cross-platform apps can also share code; a PWA is not automatically one-third of the price.

A native app may be more suitable when the project depends on hardware integration, sustained background activity or a particular app-store distribution route.

Start with one useful feature

You do not need to replace a working website. Start with the task that fails on a poor connection, build a small prototype and test it on actual devices. Check updates too: visitors must not remain stuck on an old cached version.

Tell us what your users need to do and we can assess whether PWA features would help. The project quiz is another place to start.