The Progressive Web App term is now five years old, and it's time to sit down and understand where we are at 2021 within the platform, what has changed during 2020 and what we are expecting for the upcoming months.
2020 was a particular year for everyone, and Progressive Web Apps are no exception. In terms of innovation in the PWA space, it was the laziest of the last five years.
PWA Market Share #
I will try to answer the most challenging question: what's the market share of PWAs? The only two companies with an accurate answer are Google and Samsung from their or WebAPK minting servers. Unfortunately, they are not sharing the data with us. Samsung disclosed a number at the end of 2019, but the company didn't update it since then. You can see it in the previous article Progressive Web Apps in 2020.
A WebAPK minting server operates in the cloud and generates an APK (Android Package) -or delivers a cached version- every time you install a PWA when WebAPK is enabled. For Google Chrome, that's every time the browser is used to install a PWA that passes the PWA criteria, and for Samsung, it's every time Internet Browser is used in the same situation on a Samsung device. They have the data of how many unique manifest URLs -hence PWAs- are out there.
Despite not having that information, we can extrapolate some data from different sources, including HTTP Archive 2020 Almanac.
At the end of 2020, approximately 1% of websites included a Service Worker, and 2.2% had an installable Web App Manifest file. Remember that some platforms -such as Safari on iOS or Chrome on Android- do not require a Service Worker to have a standalone experience after installation. We can assume that 2.2% of websites are installable, and 1% may pass the PWA criteria on Android, 71% of which offer some offline experience.
If we extrapolate the HTTP Archive data, the 2019 data shared from Samsung and apply the growth from HTTP Archive; the numbers will be:
- ~120,000 domains may host at least one PWA.
- ~1,500,000 websites may be installable on mobile home screens, offering an app experience.
- ~600,000 websites may be offline-capable.
We can compare this with app stores stats:
- ~800,000 publishers on both Play Store and AppStore.
- ~2,000,000 apps in the AppStore, ~3,000,000 in Play Store.
It's quite tricky to get this data accurate without real information from browsers, but it's clear that PWAs are still behind native apps in the store in quantity and downloads. Also, having x amount of websites that are ready to be installed doesn't mean users are actually installing them or even that they are aware that they are installable.
UPDATE After publishing the first version of this post, the Chrome team reached me on a Twitter thread to share some of the public data they have from the WebAPK Minting server:
- WebAPK Installations per months: 10s of millions installations only on Chrome for Android (compared that with around 10 billion installations per month on stores, iOS, iPadOS and Android)
- Number of origins with PWAs has grown 170% in 2020, outperforming the trend line for prior years. This is for domains with a minimum number of installs (so they are not just tests or internal PWAs)
On the other hand, many solutions appear these days (low-code, no-code, CMS plugins) that will start creating a significant number of new PWAs. That situation is also possible on app stores with native apps, but each app needs an individual entry in the store, and app stores may limit similar apps. On the PWA side, you can create infinite different PWAs just by creating different manifest URLs, so it's always unfair to compare.
What about PWAs in the stores? #
As with the rest of the data, it's challenging to find an answer here. First, TWA-based PWA launchers are still new in the Play Store, so they don't appear in the stats. The only thing that we can measure is how many hybrids are in the Play Store -apps using the WebView, including Cordova and Capacitor apps-.
Using data from AppBrain Stats we can conclude that 12% of apps in the Play Store (around 360,000 apps) are using the Web View. However, these apps are typically on the long tail as they count as 2% of the downloads.
While some of them may be using offline HTML content in the APK or using native plugins not available in the Web Platform, many are candidates to be replaced in the future with a Trusted Web Activity APK. We don't have data on AppStore, but we can assume that at least 50% of those apps in the Play Store are also available in the AppStore with the same codebase.
