PWA Bracket Challenge 2019: The Final Four

by Jillian MacNulty | Last Updated: Apr 4, 2019

Sixteen Progressive Web Apps. Four rounds of intense competition. And now, we’re down to our Final Four. These four brands have built PWAs that have passed the tests–they beat our their close rivals in the industry matchup round, had Lighthouse scores that brought them to the Final Four, and now–they compete based on ROI. Everybody can get behind a good success story, right? Especially when it involves some serious results for both the business and the customer. That’s why we’re going to take a look at the results these Final Four PWAs drove for their respective brands, and determine who will move on to the Championship round.

Spotify When the Spotify team noticed that they were losing a significant number of potential users to the “hard wall” of an app download, they decided to create a PWA version of their player. Senior Product Manager Matt Rizzo took the stage at last year’s Google Chrome Dev Summit to share some of their impressive results:

54% increase in one-day plays
14% increase in daily active users
30% of logins came from churned users

Indianapolis Motor Speedway The IMS leveraged the speed and reliability of PWAs to create an unforgettable race day experience for their VIP suite guests, and the accessible mobile experience paid off in guest loyalty!

<2 seconds to load (even on race day, with 300,000 people in the stands!)
73% of guests opted in for real-time notifications
53% of guests opted in to receive post-event communications

Pinterest The Pinterest team said it themselves–their web experience was “horrible”. So much so that Pinterest’s Engineer Lead (at the time), Zack Argyle, apologized to a Pinterest user who tweeted about how bad the experience was. That’s when they knew they had to step it up, and a PWA was the way to go if they wanted results.

4x faster than previous experience
103% increase in weekly users
300% increase in session duration
300% increase in weekly users in low-bandwidth areas

Starbucks The Starbucks PWA mirrors its native counterpart almost identically, which gives non-rewards members the ability to “test drive” rewards functionality like mobile ordering. Thanks to some constant improvement and iteration over the past year from the team headed up by David Brunelle, the coffee giant has been able to see some major results.

2x faster than previous experience
65% increase in Starbucks Rewards registrations via the web

Told you this round would be tough! But, certain results just can’t be ignored. So, without further ado...here are the PWAs moving onto the Championship Round!

Spotify We couldn’t ignore that churned user stat–with so many brands having trouble retaining (and re-winning!) customers, this is a stat that pushed Spotify into the finals.

Pinterest Triple digit percentages? Enough said. Pinterest had enough jaw-dropping results to champion over last year’s winner.

And now, Spotify and Pinterest go head-to-head based on overall experience...and we need your help to decide which experience is worthy of the winner’s circle! Here’s how you can become a judge:

Try each of these PWAs for yourself! Fire them up on your mobile device, save them to your home screen, and see how app-like they are. Spotify // Pinterest
Head over to our Twitter on Monday to participate in our poll
Check back for results on Tuesday morning!

PWA Bracket Challenge 2019: The Final Four

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