A one year PWA retrospective - Pinterest Engineering

A great overview of Pinterest's PWA

The verdict

Now for the part you’ve all been waiting for: the numbers. Weekly active users on mobile web have increased 103 percent year-over-year overall, with a 156 percent increase in Brazil and 312 percent increase in India. On the engagement side, session length increased by 296 percent, the number of Pins seen increased by 401 percent and people were 295 percent more likely to save a Pin to a board. Those are amazing in and of themselves, but the growth front is where things really shined. Logins increased by 370 percent and new signups increased by 843 percent year-over-year. Since we shipped the new experience, mobile web has become the top platform for new signups. And for fun, in less than 6 months since fully shipping, we already have 800 thousand weekly users using our PWA like a native app (from their homescreen).

Looking back over one full year since we started rebuilding our mobile web, we’re so proud of the experience we’ve created for our users. Not only is it significantly faster, it’s also our first platform to support right-to-left languages and “night mode.” Investing in a full-featured PWA has exceeded our expectations. And we’re just getting started.

Read full post.

This is a really great post show the benefits of building high-quality, fast and engaging sites. It's great to also see that the 'App' part of PWA, specifically 'Add to Homescreen' installability is being used by lots of users. Reading the broader post it's good to see that they were focusing on a great website experience, that is focus on fast loading sites that have repeatable and predictable performance via code-splitting to reduce the initial load and also good architecture that they can share across the team. Then once you have the base experience you can layer on features like push notifications for the users that want them.

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