Dawning of Progressive Web Applications (PWA): Edging Out the Pitfalls of Traditional Mobile Development

Over the years, there has been a constant increase in the demand for mobile software due to the constant increase in the number of smart phones. Mobile developers have the liberty to adopt different development architectures or strategies which includes the native app, mobile web app, hybrid app and the new Progressive Web App (PWA). PWA which combines the features of the native and web development strategies emerged as a better alternative to other development approaches due to additional benefits such as offline capability, background synchronization and so on despite several concerns that have been raised towards the efficiency of PWAs. Hence, this research work aims at performing a comparative study on the existing mobile development architectures using the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) technique, performing feature comparison on the native, hybrid and PWA architecture and finally argues for the PWA development architecture based on the comparisons. The comparison will aid researchers and development firm in understanding the concept of PWA thereby motivating them to adopt this strategy for further development.