Cómo una startup hotelera creó una aplicación de Android que se basa en contents Web para aumentar drásticamente la participación del Username y mantener el tamaño de archivo bajo
Updated
Founded in 2013, OYO rooms
It has become one of the largest hotel companies in India, with hotels in hundreds of cities in more than 80 countries. That success was due in part to making your online booking experience as quick and easy as possible.
Until recently, the OYO team offered so much
Progressive web application (PWA)
y una aplicación nativa de Android para lograr ese target. La aplicación de Android tuvo una participación significativamente mayor: los usuarios convirtieron tres veces más a menudo que los que usaban la PWA. Pero los usuarios también tendían a desinstalar la aplicación de Android con el tiempo debido a preocupaciones sobre el espacio de almacenamiento.
To reduce the Android app's footprint on users' devices while maintaining the benefits of the native experience, the team decided to turn to
Trusted Web Activities (TWA).
What is a TWA?
Before Chrome 72, Android developers who wanted to display web content in their native apps had to use
WebView, que tenía algunas limitaciones importantes: no es tan rápido como Chrome y no incluye todas las API y funciones de Chrome. Por lo tanto, si deseaba un comportamiento que el motor de renderizado de WebView no admitiera, tenía que construir su propio browser en torno a él, ¡lo cual no es exactamente trivial!
Trusted Web Activities (TWA)
Address those limitations by displaying web content directly in Chrome. Breaking down the TWA name helps explain its features:
- A activity es una pantalla o vista en la user interface de una aplicación de Android.
- TWAs use Chrome to display Web content for application activities.
- The content of a TWA is trustworthy because it uses
Digital asset links
to verify that the same person created the Android application and the displayed web content.
It is easy to confuse PWA and TWA.
PWA use web technologies to create experiences comparable to native applications.
TWA le permite mostrar una PWA en un contenedor de aplicaciones de Android que se puede descargar de Google Play Store.
Why create a TWA instead of a native application?
More and more Android applications offer content from the developers' own websites. The TWAs recognize that reality by offering the best of the world of native and web applications:
- Tienen toda la funcionalidad esperada de las aplicaciones nativas de Android, incluido un icono de inicio, push notifications y pantalla completa.
- They offer the performance and features of Chrome.
- They use the version of Chrome installed on the device, so they always have the latest APIs and features.
- They use much less storage than a fully native app, which is a concern for many users, especially those with low-end devices.
Running in Chrome also has a number of useful benefits. For example, TWAs share Chrome storage, including cookies, passwords, and everything stored through the
Web storage API. One benefit of this setting is that users stay connected through the browser and the TWA application.
La compatibilidad con TWA pronto estará disponible en varios browsers de Android; tanto Samsung como FireFox se han comprometido con TWA. Puede especificar qué navegador desea que use su aplicación, aunque es mejor seleccionar el navegador predeterminado del usuario.
Building OYO Lite
The OYO team wanted to give their users a native app experience without compromising device storage, so they decided to create
OYO Lite, a TWA built on top of your existing PWA.
Getting started with a PWA is essential. Users expect a native-like experience in an application they run from the Android launcher, so web content served in a TWA should provide that experience, including:
- Fast loading and response times
- Reliability when the user has limited or no connectivity
- A unified look and feel (by providing, for example, a splash screen and application color)
If you already have a PWA, the steps to create a basic TWA are designed to be low-effort, even if you've never developed it for Android before. Here's what the OYO team did:
And here is the result:
OYO Lite in action.
For a more detailed tutorial on how to create a basic TWA, see Peter McLachlan and Andre Bandarra's
Google I / O TWA Talk 2019.
Para obtener más información sobre cómo el equipo de OYO creó OYO Lite, incluido un análisis profundo de su enfoque para crear una pantalla de presentación que be accesible para todos los usuarios de Android, eche un vistazo a Ankit Jain.
post to Medium.
How a TWA Helped OYO Meet Its Users' Needs
Al almacenar la mayoría de los activos de sus aplicaciones en el cache de Chrome, el equipo de OYO pudo reducir el tamaño de descarga inicial para OYO Lite a unos esbeltos 850 KB. ¡Eso es solo el 7% del tamaño de su aplicación nativa de Android!
Esa pequeña huella combinada con las comodidades de una aplicación nativa descargable de Google Play Store generó ganancias significativas en la participación del usuario:
- A conversion rate tres veces mayor que la tasa de PWA
- Three times more registered users than PWA, on average
- A rating of 4.1 on the Google Play Store
And in addition to the benefits for the user, going with a TWA meant that the team had only one code base, which they could easily update without waiting for users to download the latest version of the application.
Create your own TWA
OYO's online booking platform is just a use case for TWA. They can be ideal for many projects currently created as native applications or web pages, from shopping carts and payment flows to FAQs and contact forms.
Check out these links to get started with TWA:
