Learning from others: how Telegram, FT, RioRun and Barcelona City Council PWA are built

One of the most successful ways of unraveling the mysteries of a new technology is keeping an eye on how others are using this new technology, what are they achieving and how they are building things.

So let’s take a look at four progressive web apps published by four big brands: Telegram, the Financial Times, The Guardian and the Barcelona City Council.

Did you know that Telegram also comes as a progressive web app? It’s an open source one, GNU GPL licensed. And its code repository is available in GitHub. So you can read a detailed description on the underlying tech, inspect all pull requests by developers, browse every single change made to the source code since its first version and even read the entire source code of the current version.

We don’t have so much information published about another well known progressive web app: the one that Financial Times published for their subscribers to read the news in their mobile devices. But still we can learn something from their experience, because Matt Andrews, their lead engineer, wrote a tutorial on the basics of their app back in 2012! He also wrote some very instructive notes as a companion for a workshop on offline first websites he did in 2014 at the SmashingConf in Freiburg, at Imperial College in London and internally for the Financial Times. They include a chapter on the Financial Times app.

Another useful post is the one by Rich Harris, from The Guardian’s interactive team, published in 2016. It’s titled “How we made the RioRun progressive web app” and includes commentary on difficulties the team encountered while developing this progressive web app for runners and sport lovers that makes extensive use of the GPS and the offline capabilities of modern browsers.

The last one app in this review is Points of Interest of Barcelona, an app we did here in Metodian, the team that authors progressivewebapps.net, for the Barcelona City Council. We published a series of slides made for a talk we performed at the 2017 edition of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. We hope you like it. Enjoy!