Indian retail brands routinely commission a native app because a competitor has one, without examining whether their actual usage pattern justifies it. A Progressive Web App — a website that can be added to a home screen, cached for offline use, and can send push notifications on Android — delivers most of what retail actually needs from an app at a fraction of the build and maintenance cost.
The case for native strengthens only when the product genuinely needs device capabilities a browser can't reach reliably: background location tracking for delivery, deep camera integration for a try-on feature, or offline-first behaviour so complete that connectivity is assumed absent rather than intermittent. Most retail apps use none of these — they're a catalogue, a cart, and a checkout, all of which a modern PWA handles well.
The install-free nature of a PWA matters more in the Indian market than in markets with abundant phone storage. A first-time visitor can add a PWA to their home screen in one tap with no app store detour, no permission dialogue about app store data collection, and no multi-hundred-megabyte download competing for space on a budget phone that's already nearly full. That lower friction converts into more people actually keeping and returning to the experience.
The honest limitation is iOS, where PWA support — particularly for push notifications — has historically lagged Android. If your customer base skews heavily iOS, the case for a PWA weakens accordingly. For a retail brand whose customers are predominantly on Android, which describes a large share of the Indian market, a well-built PWA is very often the pragmatic choice, and building a native app before validating that a PWA can't do the job is money spent on capability nobody needed yet.
