The Shift Towards PWA in Application Development : An Analysis of PWA versus Native Application

With mobile usage on the rise developers are more than ever faced with the issue of developing for multiple platforms. With Google's introduction of Progressive Web Applications (PWA) it is possible to build app-like web applications that can run on any platform. This study aims to investigate if PWA is mature enough to replace an already developed native iOS application. Specifically it aims to investigate if a PWA can achieve the same functionality and security as a native application, as well as what technologies are needed to do so. To verify this question an iOS application called iHug developed by a software company called Cloud Enablers was used as a reference point. With this reference a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) copy was developed as a PWA to verify that the functionality could be achieved. This PWA was not intended to replace the existing native application, but instead coexist with it. That means that the PWA must be able to communicate with the original application. In addition an investigation was done to see what measures needed to be taken to achieve security. The results showed that the same functionality was achievable, as was the security. Even though the results are promising, due to the native application not being developed with a PWA in mind there was a lot of extra work that had to be done to replicate certain functionalities and SDK choices. On this basis, while it is certainly possible to achieve the same functionality it is much harder to do so when the counterpart was not developed to be able to communicate with a PWA