Top 10 progressive web apps in the news industry

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Worldwide media provide thousands of stories and news articles daily to their readers. Many discover them solely on mobile devices. The PWA standard is a publisher’s dream. It eases up readers’ access to the newest articles and allows them to share the hottest of them seamlessly between different touchpoints. Let’s check some PWA success stories from the publishing industry.

Recently we presented PWA examples from the fashion industry but other sectors can also derive business benefits by implementing a PWA as their mobile-first solution.

Today, we want to present you with the 10 top progressive web apps in the news industry. Now, you can get to know publishers’ success stories better and find out how they are doing with their PWA development. The summary is presented in alphabetical order.

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Billings Gazette | US

PWA Billings Gazette

Billings Gazette is a daily newspaper printed in Montana. It’s one of the most widely distributed newspapers in the US. Billings Gazette has decided to implement the PWA concept to facilitate access to publications. Their PWA works in offline mode, which leaves their sites readable even when not connected to the internet. It is one of many advantages that a PWA has over native applications.

Highlights:

  • can work in offline mode
  • website design looks like a mobile app

Visit: Billings Gazette

Financial Times | UK

Financial Times

Financial Times is a British journal with an elite character and international reach, oriented to economic and financial issues, owned by Nikkei Inc. The characteristic feature of the Financial Times is the salmon color of the paper on which it is printed. The same color is used for the background on the website. They have produced a PWA version of the publication to allow readers to consume articles offline and on the go.

Visit: Financial Times

Flipboard | US

Flipboard

Flipboard is a personalized application that collects various content from social media, news channels, and other websites. And then all of this information is presented in a magazine format which allows users to “browse” shared articles, images, and videos. Readers can also save stories in Flipboard magazines.

Thanks to its PWA, users will be able to view previously saved offline content, among other things.

Highlights:

  • slim and fast PWA
  • Flipboard has a full-featured native application, but a PWA allows them to hedge their bets in terms of user preference

Visit: Flipboard

Forbes | US

Forbes

Forbes is an American business biweekly. The headquarters of the editorial office is on Fifth Avenue in New York. Steve Forbes is editor-in-chief of Forbes, and editor of Randall Lane. Forbes is associated with lists containing the richest people on Earth, namely The Forbes 400, a list of the richest people in the USA; The Forbes 400, a list of the richest people in the world and The Forbes 500, a list of the largest companies in the world.

The Forbes mobile PWA was a huge success in spring 2017.

Highlights:

  • faster load times – new site loads in an average of 0.8 seconds
  • the app increased user engagement by 100%
  • 43% increase in sessions per user
  • 3x increase in scroll depth
  • ad views up 20%
  • highly visual content
  • push notifications specifically for Android devices
  • the story format called cards where the users can swipe through any kind of content
  • Forbes cut down the average size of its webpages from 2MB to 30KB

Visit: Forbes

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Medium | US

Medium

The Medium platform is an example of social journalism, which has a collection of amateur and professional content, along with various publications, blogs and publishers,and is regularly treated as a blog.

Highlights:

  • the web page improved its initial performance score from 26 to 44
  • page load time decreased from 7 to 4.5 seconds

Visit: Medium

Smashing magazine | DE

PWA Smashing magazine

Smashing Magazine is an online magazine and eBook publisher for web developers and web designers. The magazine is available on the territory of the European Union. Smashing Magazine covers topics such as coding, design, mobile, graphics, UX design, and WordPress.

The Smashing Magazine website is now a full PWA.

Highlights:

  • the main page now needs 2 – 3 seconds to become fully interactive
  • the HTTP/2 data transfer is fast enough on 3G
  • caching is on

Visit: Smashing Magazine

Sports Mole | UK

PWA Sports Mole

Sports Mole is online magazine about the latest breaking sports news and live coverage around the clock. Sports Mole is a site from the team that created the entertainment website Digital Spy. The site is updated around the clock and covers everything from football, cricket, tennis, rugby, and golf to Formula 1.

Highlights:

  • page load is fast enough on 3G
  • page transitions don’t lag due to network conditions

Visit: Sports Mole

Twitter | US

PWA Twitter

Twitter is a popular microblogging online tool launched in 2006. But now we want to talk about Twitter Lite. It’s a new mobile web experience which minimizes data usage, loads quickly on slower connections, is resilient on unreliable mobile networks, and takes up less than 1MB on your device. Building a PWA has allowed users to access many functions available to desktop users and native users of the mobile application.

The Twitter Lite app is a data and storage friendly way to use Twitter on a smartphone.

Highlights:

  • 65% increase in pages per session
  • 75% increase in Tweets sent
  • 20% decrease in bounce rate
  • loads quickly on 2G and 3G networks
  • minimizes data usage — turn on data saver mode to download only the images or videos you want to see
  • the PWA is only 600KB over the wire vs. 23.5MB of downloaded data needed to install the native Android app

Read the full case study | Visit: Twitter Lite

The Weather Channel | US

PWA The Weather Channel

The Weather Channel has been forecasting since the 1980s and now serves people all around the world across many platforms. The Weather Channel is a top 20 site in the United States. On mobile, The Weather Channel pushes vital information to their native-app users. Weather.com wanted to notify its users about weather changes immediately. The progressive web app fits perfectly with this, so Weather.com has introduced push notifications in a browser.

Highlights:

  • 80% improvement in load time
  • availability of the PWA – 62 languages + 178 countries

Read the full case study | Visit: The Weather Channel

Zuperkülblog | DE

Zuperkülblog

New on the market, Zuperkülblog is a blog about art, film, design, and photography.

Highlights:

  • page load is fast enough on 3G
  • page transitions don’t feel like they block on the network
  • responds with a 200 when offline

Visit: Zuperkülblog

 

Published November 14, 2018