Why add to homescreen is important

Reengagement is a key advantage that native applications have enjoyed over websites. The presence of their icon on the user's homescreen and app shelves provides quick, visual access to the brand's experience. It's subtle, but that icon is a constant visual reminder of the customer's relationship to the brand.

Browsers have provided a built-in mechanism for us to bookmark websites using favorites for years now, but these lists have become cluttered messes we often forget about. We have also been able to add bookmarks to the desktop, start menu, and even the windows task bar, but the process is manual, and most consumers do not know that it exists.

More modern browsers have started logging pages that you frequently visit and providing bookmarks to these common destinations when you open a new tab. This is an example of making the user more productive without asking them to bookmark a URL.

These bookmarks do not offer the same native experience that the progressive web app's add to homescreen experience does. Chrome on Android is leading the way with the most advanced PWA installation benefits by making all installed PWAs a WebAPK.

WebAPKs are a technical way to say that Chrome on Android will silently upgrade progressive web apps to an almost native app by packaging them as an APK (Android executable) during the installation process. They are still limited because they do not have access to Android-specific APIs like native Android apps do.

However, if you submit your PWA to the Windows Store and the customer installs it from the Windows Store, your progressive web app is a native app. It will enjoy all the benefits and capabilities as native apps do on Windows, including file system access and the ability to integrate with features like Cortana.

The ability to earn a place on a customer's home screen is important. Both native and web applications have mechanisms, but both have friction that reduces success and increase costs. There are 6-8 steps which you must use to coax a potential customer to install your app on mobile platforms. In 2012, Gabor Cselle estimated that each of these steps eliminates 20% of the mobile user's interested in installing your app (https://blog.gaborcselle.com/2012/10/every-step-costs-you-20-of-users.html). This means for a 6-step installation process that only 26% of users remain, as illustrated in the following diagram. That number falls to less than 17% if there are 8 steps:

Of course, a user only starts the app installation process if they know how to/can find you in the app store. This means that your company must invest time and money driving traffic and brand awareness. Recent research reveals that this would cost between $8-14 on iOS and slightly less on Android.

Yet, for a few pennies paid per click, Facebook, pay-per-click (PPC), or banner ad campaigns can drive the same engagement to a website. Even better, if your page has a good, organic SEO profile, you can drive volumes of targeted traffic for free! However, earning a place on the customer's homescreen is not as easy. That's because it is not an obvious process.

Rewinding to the original iPhone launch, third-party apps were not available till 6 months later. At WWDC, Steve Jobs announced the third-party app solution HTML5 + AJAX (https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2007/06/11iPhone-to-Support-Third-Party-Web-2-0-Applications/):

With that proclamation, Apple provided a simple, and sort of hacky, way to drive the homescreen experience on iOS. The non-standard techniques required adding iOS Safari specific META tags to each page and having appropriate sized homescreen images.