The common knowledge is that Progressive Web App, while engaging in its user experience and significantly faster than the traditional website, is still limited in its hardware capabilities. This is a direct result of the fact that a typical Progressive Web App is still very much a webpage that relies on the Standard Web capabilities to deliver app-like features (e.g. push notifications, add to home screen, and so on). But just how comparable is it to a typical mobile native application? That’s what we’re here to find out.

PWA and Hardware Access

A PWA relies on Web APIs (Web Application Programming Interfaces) to access hardware features, and as a result of which, hardware access in PWA is oftentimes a hit or miss since not all browsers are the same. In the best-case scenario—that is if all hardware access APIs are supported in the browser in use—a Progressive Web App can be just as fully functional as a typical mobile app, barring a few capabilities which we’ll be discussing below.

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