30 Best Progressive Web Apps

Progressive Web Apps (PWA) isn’t a new concept or technology. It is just a combination of best practices to make a web app function similar to that of a desktop or mobile app. It uses modern web capabilities to deliver a native app-like user experience. In 2015, the term Progressive Web Apps was coined by Alex Russel (chrome developer) and Frances Berriman(designer).

As soon as Android and iOS embraced this new technology, it was just a matter of time before progressive web apps conquered the digital market. Other than Android and iOS, users can install Progressive Web Apps in iPadOS, Windows, Xbox, MacOS, Linux, Chrome OS and kaiOS.

Check Out: An Eagle’s View on Progressive Web Apps [Infographic]

Features of Progressive Web Apps:

• Integrated user experience
• Consistently fast
• Full responsiveness
• Browser compatibility
• App-like interface
• Push notifications
• Automatic updates
• Safe & secure
• Easy installation
• Cost Efficient

Some of the Best Platforms are as follows:

• Angular
• Polymer
• Ionic
• Vue.js
• React
• PWA Builder
• KnockOut

Read: Angular Vs. React Vs. Vue: Which Framework to Choose For Your Business?

Here are the best of our favorite PWA

1. Starbucks

After launching their mobile app in 2015, Starbucks wanted to create a system that would be universally accessible to emerging markets, and finally created a PWA (233KB, 99.84% smaller than the 148MB size of the mobile iOS app) that looks and feels exactly like a native app.

Features:

• Fast and Ultra-responsive
• Easy-to-use
• Smooth animations
• Product customisation

2. Flipboard

Flipboard, an app that curates the world’s stories for users to stay informed, and involved. Being the world’s most popular social magazine, Flipboard allows readers to keep up with all topics, news, and events happening around the world at a single place.

Advantages:

• Accessible to desktop users
• PWA minimises data usage
• Deliver fast browsing experience
• 68% increase in core engagement

3. Forbes

This American business magazine features articles on marketing, investment, finance, technology etc.

Advantages:

• Ultra-fast page load times
• Push-notifications
• Instant transitions
• Light design
• Increase user engagement
• 6x increase in readers completing articles

4. MakeMyTrip

MakeMyTrip, India’s leading travel company, wanted to make sure its mobile site was reliable for every customer, regardless of the available technology. Thus, launching a PWA was a key to offering seamless mobile experiences to more than 22 million of their customers.

Advantages:

• 3X Improved conversion rates
• More reachability
• Offline Access
• 160% increase in shopper sessions
• 30% more last minute shoppers
• 38% improvement in page load time

5. Uber

With Uber, your destination is just at your fingertips. As the company expands to new markets, Uber launched the PWA to offer a comparable booking experience to its users.

Advantages:

• Compatible on low-end devices
• Super-lightweight web app
• Core ride request app is just 50KB & load within 3 seconds on 2G networks
• Convenient offline access to rides

6. Pinterest

With a focus on international growth, Pinterest started their new mobile web experience by launching their PWA.

Advantages:

• Provides a fast, native experience
• High-performance solution ensured to all users
• Offers low bandwidth usage
• Push notifications & offline support
• User-generated ads increased by 45%
• 50% rise in ad click-through rate
• Improved user engagement

7. BookMyShow

India’s largest ticketing firm BookMyShow, with over 50+ million monthly visitors, encountered high bounce rates and to overcome the issues, they launched a PWA to deliver the best experience possible for their users.

Advantages:

• Smooth, seamless movie-booking experience
• Super-light app
• High-speed
• Lower data consumption
• Provide reliable performance on slow or unreliable networks
• 80%+ increase in conversion rates
• PWA is 54X smaller than the Android app; 180x smaller than the iOS app
• Takes less than 2.94 seconds to load and checks out within 30 seconds

8. Spotify

Spotify is an international media service provider that gives you access to millions of songs and podcasts from different languages. Compared to its native-app, the PWA version of Spotify is considerably faster.

Advantages:

• Visually polished
• More reactive & adaptive
• 45% increase in desktop users
• 40% increase in average listening hours per month
• 30% increase in monthly active users
• Improved in-app animations

9. AliExpress

AliExpress is a global online retail marketplace mostly popular in Russia, Brazil and America. Along with the mobile app, AliExpress has now introduced a cross-browser PWA to serve its web users as well as mobile users.

Advantages:

• Offline work mode
• Fast loading speed
• Push notification support
• 2X more pages visited per session per user
• Conversion rates increased by 104%
• Time spent per session has increased by 74% on all browsers

10. Twitter Lite

With over 320 million monthly users globally, Twitter is a mainstream platform that helps users find out what’s happening around the world. The Twitter Lite PWA combines the best of the modern web and native features to its users.

Advantages:

• Instant loading, user engagement and lower data consumption
• 65% increase in pages per session
• Faster, least expensive, and more reliable
• 75% increase in Tweets sent
• 20% decrease in bounce rate
• Site loads within 3 seconds for repeat visits even on slow networks

11. Tinder

The geo-social networking and online dating application, Tinder is more than just a dating app. Therefore, Tinder’s PWA is one of the best examples on how to build, optimise, and manage a powerful progressive web app.

Advantages:

• Replicates the native experience completely
• Light, fast & convenient
• PWA is approximately 90% smaller than native Android app
• Load times cut from 11.91 seconds to 4.69 seconds
• Deliver excellent user experience

12. Flipkart

India’s largest e-commerce site, Flipkart found it difficult to provide a user experience that was as fast and engaging for all type of mobile users. As a result, the company launched Flipkart Lite, a PWA that combines the best of the web and native app.

Advantages:

• Fast and streamlined site
• “Add to Home Screen” option delivers high-quality visits
• Offline work mode
• Push Notifications
• 3X Lower data usage
• 40% Higher re-engagement rate

13. Wego

Wego has now found new ways to deliver amazing user experiences on the web by creating an AMP based PWA.

Advantages:

• Convenient one-click access and payment features
• 10X Increase in page speed
• lightning fast mobile website experience
• 49% increase in search-to-conversion rates
• 95% increase in partner conversion rates
• 3X increase in ad CTRs

14. Telegram

With over 100 million registered users, Telegram is one of the fastest growing cloud-based instant messaging services which is another great PWA use case worth mentioning.

Advantages:

• Easy to use interface
• Extremely fast
• Secure, and Seamless synchronisation across devices
• Has an in-app browser

15. Yummly

Yummly is a smart cooking discovery platform that understands user tastes and recommends personalised recipes, shopping list, and one-hour grocery delivery. Along with its native Android & iOS app, the app is also available on web browsers as a PWA.

Advantages:

• Offline search engine for food, cooking, and recipes
• Access to video tutorials
• Provides Smart Ingredient Shopping List

16. Lancome

Lancome cosmetics is a well-known brand that has adopted Progressive Web Applications successfully.

Though their mobile users have risen dramatically in recent years, they noticed that their mobile conversions are low compared to desktop conversions.

To improve that, they decided to develop a mobile app, but it only satisfied their existing users who have regular purchase needs. So, they turned to build a Progressive Web App for a faster and enhanced mobile web experience.

They took advantage of service workers to deliver reliable performance on unstable networks and push notifications for user re-engagement.

Their PWA helped them to:

• Reduce bounce rates by 15%
• Increased conversion rate by 17%
• An improvement in mobile sessions by 51%
• Rise in conversions on recovered carts via push notifications by 8%, etc.

17. Alibaba

Alibaba is one of the largest online B2B firms in the world. They have served more than 200 different countries. With this global customer base, they need a most compelling bridge that helps connect their users with them. Also, they wanted to deliver a great user experience for their first-time visitors and returning visitors.

So, they first decide to focus on developing the web and mobile app with a good design and user-friendly functionality. But, later, Alibaba realised that these are not the perfect tools for customer’s continuous engagement. Therefore, they decided to build a Progressive Web App.

With PWA launch:

• Their conversion rate increased by 76%
• The number of active users increased by 30% on Android and 14% on iOS

18. The Weather Channel

The Weather Channel has always looked to the latest technology to be in the top position of weather reporting. Their goal is to provide timely and accurate weather information when it matters the most of their global audience.

So, they need to build a Progressive Web App that shows reliable performance even for users with no smartphones, bad-quality internet connection, etc.

After the PWA launch:

• They saw an increase in load time by 80%
• It helped them to become available in 62 languages and 178 countries

19. Trivago

Trivago is one of the world’s leading hotel search engines. The users of Trivago access them through mobiles than on desktop computers. So, once they set their sights on mobile, they searched for the best mobile technology available to reach the maximum users.

Also, they wanted to provide a fast and seamless experience. Hence, Trivago found a Progressive Web App as the answer.

Trivago Progressive Web App makes it easy for users to compare hotel prices, read reviews, or book a hotel. It also contributes to minimising the search marketing effort for the hotel owners.

After PWA launch:

• They saw an increase in user engagement by 150%
• An increase in CTR by 97%
• 67% of disconnected users continue using their app after coming back online

20. Pure Formulas

It is a well-known US online health and supplement firm. They were facing slow page load speed, high cart abandonment rates, etc. With PWA, they overcame these problems.

They saw a:

• 20% boost in conversion rates across all browsers
• 20% rise in revenue
• 10% increase in order value on average

21. Housing.com

Housing.com is one of the leading real estate services based in Mumbai. The platform helps users to simplify the search for a place to live. Be it for rent or purchase, in over 35 major Indian cities.

Most of their targeted users reach them via 2g or 3g networks, with low-end devices. And Housing.com was trying to overcome its page loading issue. They realised that any improvement in page loading time could significantly boost their conversion rate.

So, they decided to build a Progressive Web App to serve their users better. It helped their users get a fast mobile web experience, allowing them to use less data and improving user engagement.

With PWA, users can quickly find what they are looking for or continue browsing while offline.

So, with PWA, Housing.com gets:

• 38% more conversions
• 10% longer average session
• 40% lower bounce rate
• Overall 30% faster page load time

22. Jumia Travel

It is one of the outstanding examples of Progressive Web Apps. Their targeted customers are vacationers or business travellers in Africa.

Earlier Jumia introduced native apps for iOS and Android devices, but only after investing in Progressive Web Apps, they saw a significant increase in their traffic. Their app is laser-focused on usability, data savings, and mobile performance.

With PWA:

• Their conversion rate on hotels and flights grew by over 30%
• The bounce rate dropped by nearly a half

23. The Washington Post

They are one of the greatest U.S publishers that deliver breaking news to a base of 80M followers. 55% of their traffic comes from mobile devices. So, they realised that providing a great reading experience on mobile devices is crucial for their long-term success.

The PWA platform allows them to publish over 1000 articles per day that load faster and are accessible anywhere across the mobile web.

After the PWA launch, they saw:

• An 88% performance improvement over their traditional mobile website
• A 63% increase in mobile search users who returned within 7 days. It demonstrates that PWAs are great for customer retention.

24. Konga

It is a relatively young brand established in Nigeria in 2012. It enables merchants to promote, sell, and interact with their users.

Konga’s one of most distinctive features is its KXPRESS. It is a company-run logistics network that helps merchants deliver orders to their customers.

The company decided to build a PWA because most of its targeted customers shop from their mobile devices and have poor internet connections.

Their PWA helped Konga to deliver the best user experience by allowing them to browse fast and find the products quickly. Moreover, even in slow 2G networks, it worked and let the users save a significant amount of data.

The impact was:

• 1.5x-2x better performance
• 63% less data for initial load and 84% less data to complete the first transaction compared to the earlier mobile version
• 92% less data for initial load and 82% less data to complete the first transaction than the previous native apon

25. Padpiper

It is a platform to help students easily find trusted housing for school terms and internships. Also, it allows landlords to find suitable tenants for their spaces quickly.

After PWA launch:

• Their targeted audience expanded from just college students to those who recently graduated, people with professions that need travelling, etc.
• It supports 9000 schools and has over 100 listings on its PWA
• Provide verified landlords and listing reviews to help students find the right fit
• It enables students to add their work address, and after that, they can look up directions to work from each listing in the SERP

26. Garbarino

It is a famous retail Argentinian company that offers various products like electronics, DIY items, furniture, etc. However, 80% of their traffic comes from Chrome, and people didn’t hurry to install Garbarino’s native app. So, they decided to convert their mobile app into a Progressive Web App.

Garbarino has turned into one of the best PWA examples with its bright-red brand colors and intelligent design. The app is fast and user-friendly and helps customers find, pick, and buy the product they need.

After the PWA launch, they saw:

• 27% increase in conversion rate
• 9% decrease in bounce rate
• 13% increase in the number of returning visitors
• 35% increase in page views per session
• 30% increase in the average session duration

27. OLX

OLX is another best example of PWA. It is one of the largest online destinations for classified ads in India. OLX connects local people to help them sell, buy, or exchange used products and services, making it easy for anyone to post a listing on the web.

OLX gets over 90% of its traffic from mobile devices, and this number is still growing. They get this traffic from half of their native app and half of their mobile website. However, they noticed that the majority of conversions were still happening on the native app. And their mobile-web bounce rate rises as well.

So they analysed the behaviour and realised that the mobile web experience was too slow. Monetisation also suffered from slow-loading ads. So, they looked to PWA technologies to provide a faster-loading, immersive, and app-like experience. In addition, it helped them to take advantage of push notifications and the “Add to Home Screen” prompt.

With push notifications, users get messages from buyers or sellers. These notifications arrive even if the browser is no longer running. So, altogether, with PWA, OLX saw:

• 250% increase in user engagement rate
• 146% increase in CTR
• 80% decrease in bounce rate
• 23% less time until the page is interactive

28. Petlove

Petlove is a Brazilian pet supply brand. 60% of users in Brazil browse via the web and make online purchases exclusively through their phones. Since delivering the best shopping experience on mobile is crucial, Petlove realised that building a PWA can help improve their sales and conversions.

After the PWA launch:

• There is a 280% increase in conversions
• 270% increase in the average time per session
• The users require 8x less data, etc.

29. Treebo

Treebo is a well-known hotel booking website in India. When founded in 2014, it was a budget hotel aggregator that caters to users who were short on money.

Recently, they switched to a PWA as their default mobile experience. Their PWA is designed to showcase the most optimal choices, and features users decide to pick in a room during their stay.

With PWA:

• They saw a 4x increase in conversions year on year
• Repeat users converted 3x higher
• There is 30% improvement in time-to-interactive

30. BMW

The PWA of BMW was built to offer many articles, stories, and podcasts through a webpage with a classy design that reflects the automaker’s style. With PWA, a mobile user can swipe through valuable content delivered in “loops” that goes beyond the automotive industry.

This well-planned reading experience makes more car shoppers interested in browsing for their future BMW.

With PWA, they saw:

• A 30% increase in CTR to their sales site
• 4 times increase in site loading time
• A 50% increase in mobile users
• A 49% increase in organic traffic

So, want to know when it is preferable to choose Progressive Web App development for your business?

Dig Deeper : How to Create a Progressive Web App with React

Conclusion

As technology keeps evolving, users start expressing their preferences more clearly. And it is up to the businesses to ensure that they pick up on these trends and adapt themselves to stay relevant to their target audience. PWA is definitely a long-term investment and seems like it is the future, that will help mobile apps reach even more users. And you know what the best part is? There are no restrictions, as on the app stores.

If you are looking for a faster and better option to get into the market, our team of developers from NeoITO delivers swift, immersive, consistent, and about 3X times faster progressive web apps than standard native apps.