Kony now supports making progressive web apps

Kony, Inc. announced new enhancements of its Kony AppPlatform to support Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). Kony is the first vendor to support enterprise-grade, low-code PWA development for mission-critical apps. Developers can use Kony’s visual low-code platform to develop PWAs, while leveraging backend services and third-party integrations for building enterprise apps.
 
PWAs are web applications that load like regular web pages or websites but can offer the user functionality such as working offline, push notifications and device hardware access traditionally available only to native mobile applications. PWAs are an emerging technology that combine the open standards of the web offered by modern browsers to provide benefits of a rich mobile experience. Kony consistently achieved a 100 percent score on Google Lighthouse with its standard configurations. Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages. Users can run it against any web page, public or requiring authentication. It has audits for performance, accessibility, Progressive Web Apps, and more.
 
“Businesses today need enterprise-grade, low-code solutions that can help them improve app development productivity and accelerate delivery,” said Burley Kawasaki, executive vice president of products, Kony, Inc. “This need has caused the industry to look for enhanced web development approaches leading to the rapid shift to using PWA technology to build responsive mobile web apps. We’ve made ground-breaking enhancements to our Kony AppPlatform to deliver first-to-market PWA support using low-code tools. This enables building of PWA application by all businesses large and small and expands the benefits of PWA to mainstream web developers.”

Benefits of updates to support progressive web apps:

Speed – Build PWAs faster using Kony’s unique drag and drop visual application design canvas and powerful low-code development tools; rapidly assemble and automatically output rich PWA applications without coding
 
Enterprise-grade – Build PWAs that are by default secure, reliable, and perform at scale using Kony’s enterprise-grade security architecture and mission-critical backend micro-services architecture
 
Lower Cost – By reusing existing web development skills and low-code tools to build enterprise-grade PWAs, businesses can reduce the total cost of building high-performing and secure mobile apps that scale to meet mission-critical enterprise needs
  
PWA technology is maturing quickly, and Kony anticipates this will drive a high adoption rate. This view is also seen among industry analysts who have found that PWAs have the potential to disrupt how enterprises build their mobile apps of the future.
 
Michael Facemire, vice president, principal analyst, Forrester, stated: “Native apps are really expensive but give the best experience. Web apps can be mobile-optimized, but the experience is terrible. While this was once directionally true, today it’s not true at all. I’ve seen some amazing mobile web experiences that rival the best native experiences on my phone. And we now have better tools, frameworks, and build outputs to make this more of an even experience across web and native. The one I’m most excited for? Progressive web apps!” 

New PWA enhancements for Kony AppPlatform include the following: 

• Visual low code platform for building enterprise-grade PWAs using responsive design visual tooling;
• Offline app support and increased performance using automatically generated Service Workers and intelligent caching.
• Native app-like usability and improved interactions via modern app shell architecture;
• Installable to device home screens so the app can be launched directly using pre-built Web App Manifest; 
• Faster end-user performance navigations with reduced load times, smooth animations and scrolling;  
• Support for push notifications using integration with third-party web push libraries;
• Automatically and bi-directionally synchronize offline data with support for offline objects; and
• Support for Search Optimization and Social discovery.