“Should we build an app?” is usually the wrong first question. The better one is what a customer actually needs from an app-like experience — installable, works offline, sends notifications, feels fast — because a progressive web app (PWA) delivers most of that from the website you already have, without the cost, delay or distribution friction of native iOS and Android builds. Native still wins in specific cases. Knowing which case you’re in saves a genuinely large amount of budget.
A PWA is a website that behaves like an app
A progressive web app is a website enhanced with a service worker and a manifest file, which together let a browser install it to a home screen, cache assets for offline use, and send push notifications — without an app store in between. No submission review, no separate codebase per platform, no forcing a customer through an install flow before they’ve decided you’re worth the storage space. Someone can use the full experience in a browser tab today and add it to their home screen later, once they’ve decided it’s worth keeping around. That progressive commitment — try it, then install it, rather than install it to try it — is the whole idea behind the name.
Native still wins when you need deep device integration
Some capabilities genuinely require native code: sustained background processing, deep Bluetooth or hardware integration, the tightest possible camera or AR performance, or a product where offline-first isn’t a nice-to-have but the entire premise. If your product’s core value depends on squeezing the last bit of performance out of the device, or on APIs a browser simply doesn’t expose, native is the honest answer and a PWA will feel like a compromise. That’s a real, if shrinking, category — browsers keep closing the capability gap, but they haven’t closed it completely.
For most eCommerce and content products, distribution beats depth
For the large majority of products — content, booking, eCommerce — the deciding factor isn’t device capability, it’s distribution. An app store listing is a wall between a visitor and your product: a download, a permissions prompt, storage space they have to be willing to spend, before they’ve bought anything. A PWA removes that wall entirely — someone lands on a fast, installable site from a search result or a shared link, and the “install” moment happens only once they already want to come back. One codebase serving both the website and the installed experience also means every improvement ships to everyone at once, with no separate release cycle to manage across two app stores.
The honest test: would anyone bother downloading yours?
The question that actually decides this isn’t “can we build a PWA instead of native” — it’s “does our product justify the friction of an app store at all.” A daily-use utility with a loyal audience might earn that download. A retailer, a services business, or a content site trying to convert a first-time visitor almost never does — the friction costs more conversions than the app-store presence ever earns back. Built well, with the performance discipline we bring to every web development project, a PWA gets you installable, offline-tolerant and fast without asking a first-time visitor to make a commitment they haven’t earned yet.