Chromium Blog: The Modern Mobile Web: State of the Union

Chromium Blog

News and developments from the open source browser project

The Modern Mobile Web: State of the Union

Thursday, May 18, 2017

Posted by Rahul Roy-chowdhury, VP Product Management, Chrome

What a difference a year makes. Last year at Google I/O, we shared that the mobile web was open for business. New technologies such as AMP and Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) were bringing new capabilities, better performance, and a streamlined workflow to the mobile web.

Fast forward one year later: more than two billion AMP pages have been created and "PWA" has proved to be far more than a buzzword—it’s now the way that many businesses around the world are building for mobile devices. For more details, take a look at the video from Google I/O on the latest mobile web state of the union, or read below on how these technologies are making the modern mobile web mainstream.

Momentum Summing up all the great success stories from around the world in a single post is a tall order, but here are some highlights.

To improve the performance of Wego's mobile site, the company built AMP pages using amp-install-serviceworker to transition to a fast PWA experience. Average page load time decreased from 12 seconds to less than one second, and conversion rates increased by 95%.

When Forbes rebuilt their mobile website as a PWA, they began by re-thinking what their experience could look like on a phone. Instead of minimally updating their underlying site, Forbes integrated PWA technologies to provide an immersive, app-like experience. They saw immediate improvements and engagement rates have more than doubled since launch.

Ola, the leading cab aggregator in India, built a PWA and noticed that 20% of users who book using their PWA had previously uninstalled their app. By reducing the amount of storage space needed, the PWA allowed them to effectively re-engage with users that otherwise would have been lost.

Another success story is Twitter Lite, a PWA which minimizes data usage, is resilient on unreliable mobile networks, and is less than 1MB of space on a device. Twitter's new mobile experience is also optimized for speed, with up to 30% faster launch times as well as quicker navigation throughout the site. They've found that users are spending 2.7x more time on site, and as a result are seeing 76% more tweets on the new PWA than their previous mobile site. Twitter is seeing incredible re-engagement with 1 million sessions initiated a day from icons added to the Android homescreen.

Polished Experiences Users expect a lot from their mobile devices, and we've added tons of APIs over the past year to meet that demand. The mobile web can support more use cases and get more done than ever before. A few highlights:

Improved Add to Homescreen

Earlier this year we unveiled Improved Add to Homescreen, integrating PWAs much deeper into the Android operating system. Now, in addition to being displayed on the homescreen, PWAs are also displayed in the app launcher and Android settings alongside native apps, and can also open in response to users clicking links in Chrome or other apps.

Payments

Checkout can be a complicated process. To improve payment flows on the web, we launched a one-tap payment API called Payment Request. Using this API allows web apps to support credit cards and Google payment mechanisms such as Android Pay. We also just announced that it is now possible to integrate this API with additional payment apps.

Media Consumption

Over 70% of internet traffic is video. To allow great mobile web media experiences we have given the users more control over playback with the Media Session API, improved full screen playback with the Screen Orientation API, and we’re filling out features for offline with Background Fetch. To learn more, see our mobile web media best practices and see how the APIs can come together at our PWA for Media demo.

Tooling We’ve also been working hard to improve and extend the set of tools that let you build engaging experiences on the web.

Lighthouse is a new automated tool for measuring the quality of a web experience. It runs nearly 100 audits against your web app, checking everything from page performance, to byte efficiency, to accessibility, and gives you a summary score. New integration with Chrome's DevTools means you’ll be able to run Lighthouse audits without leaving the browser.

Polymer 2.0 is the next major release of the Polymer library, re-built from the ground up to take advantage of the best new features of the modern web platform. This release uses new Web Component API’s that have shipped in Chrome and Safari. It’s completely modular and best of all - it’s now 10% faster and 80% smaller.

Chrome is committed to making sure that you can develop easily, engage with your users, and build a thriving business around the web. For the latest news, subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us on Twitter @ChromiumDev.