Building and deploying a Progressive Web App at scale with Flipkart

At Flipkart we set out to build a mobile web experience that felt as fast and immersive as a native app — without giving up the reach of the web. The result was Flipkart Lite: a Progressive Web App built around Service Workers, app shells, Add to Home Screen, and a React-based SPA architecture tuned for flaky networks and mid-range Android devices.

The architecture was static HTML shells plus API data. Shells were pre-rendered at build time with critical CSS inlined so first paint did not wait on a large JS bundle. Service Workers served shells from cache and updated them in the background. On the client we used React and our Flux library Phrontend, and we pushed hard on rendering performance — including GPU rasterization — to stay close to 60fps.

I was part of the Flipkart Lite team that shipped that work. At Chrome Dev Summit 2015 we shared how we architected and deployed a PWA at e-commerce scale. I also spoke about building Flipkart Lite at SlashN 2015.

Watch the Chrome Dev Summit session:

Aditya Punjani’s write-up on Building Flipkart Lite goes deeper into the product and engineering details.