News

Kony Targets Low-Code Progressive Web Apps

• By David Ramel
• November 30, 2018

Kony, a major player in the mobile application development platform (MADP) space, has added the capability to create Progressive Web Apps with its low-code tooling.

Created and chiefly championed by Google, PWAs use multiple technologies to blur the line between mobile apps and mobile Web sites, providing a hybrid solution that leverages benefits of each approach. Google called PWAs the future of the mobile Web and their growing popularity prompted a Gartner analyst to claim, "Application leaders responsible for mobile app strategies must determine when -- not if -- they need to factor in PWAs as part of their overall mobile development strategy."

Kony earlier this month announced an update to its low-code Kony AppPlatform to help those application leaders do exactly that.

Aubrey Gross, a content manager at the company, said "we are the first vendor to support enterprise-grade, low-code PWA development for mission-critical apps," in announcing the new functionality.

Key benefits to customers, the company said, include: speed of development boosted by the drag-and-drop visual application design canvas and other low-code tooling; enterprise-grade security, reliability and performance; and lower cost through the reuse of existing Web development skills and low-code tools.

PWAs were introduced in 2015 by Alex Russel, who enumerated the following attributes to the new class of applications:

• Responsive: to fit any form factor
• Connectivity independent: Progressively-enhanced with Service Workers to let them work offline
• App-like-interactions: Adopt a Shell + Content application model to create appy navigations & interactions
• Fresh: Transparently always up-to-date thanks to the Service Worker update process
• Safe: Served via TLS (a Service Worker requirement) to prevent snooping
• Discoverable: Are identifiable as "applications" thanks to W3C Manifests and Service Worker registration scope allowing search engines to find them
• Re-engageable: Can access the re-engagement UIs of the OS; e.g. Push Notifications
• Installable: to the home screen through browser-provided prompts, allowing users to "keep" apps they find most useful without the hassle of an app store
• Linkable: meaning they're zero-friction, zero-install, and easy to share. The social power of URLs matters.

Pricing and other information is available here.