Earlier this year, we built the very first COVID-19 PWA, humbly named “The Coronavirus App” (if you can’t access this link, check this). Progressive Web Apps (or PWA) are great. They offer the best of both worlds: they look and feel like native apps, but under the hood, they’re actually websites — built with standard HTML, CSS and Javascript.
In these turbulent times, the fact that The Coronavirus App was a PWA didn’t just help — it was probably one of the main reasons for its success.
Regain control of your own app
We were able to launch our PWA very quickly. We came up with the idea for the app on January 25. Then launched it on January 28. 3 days from idea to launch is the kind of turnaround that’s simply impossible to achieve with native apps. Publishing an Android or iOS app requires uploading it on their respective app stores. The initial review process alone — Apple/Google checking that your app contains no shenanigans — typically takes longer than that.
ABC News had a segment about the Coronavirus App on February 3rd.
Being able to launch quickly meant we maximized our changes of getting press coverage. And in fact, we got amazing coverage by Business Insider, Forbes, ABC News and many more.
The app you see now when you access the domain coronavirus.app also looks fundamentally different than it did when we launched it. In 7 months since launch, we were able to make hundreds of small updates and at least 3 complete design overhauls. We were able to iterate very quickly on feedback from our users. Deploying a new version of the app is fast — less than 2 minutes with the Firebase CLI tool we’re using. And there’s no need for approval from the app stores. We deploy the app, change the version number to make sure our users’ browsers automatically get the latest versions of all the files, and we’re done.
A couple of months after launch, Google and Apple both announced a ban of coronavirus-related apps not approved by a national government or medical institution from their respective app stores. We got super lucky there. Had we chosen to launch the app on the stores, it would have been taken down a few months later.
With PWAs, it’s your domain, your client code and your server. You have control over everything.
#web-design #programming #web-development #pwa #progressive-web-app
