ERIC BIDELMAN: Hey, everybody.
It's Eric Bidelman here at
Chrome Dev Summit, day two.
We're just getting things
underway for the afternoon.
I'm here with Malcolm, a
product manager from Lyft team.
I think you actually kicked
off the day this morning,
talked a little bit about
how you guys built just
an amazing, progressive web
app, really lightning fast.
Can you kind of highlight
what you guys did
and why you decided
to build a PWA?
MALCOLM ONG: Yeah, sure.
We built-- our PWA actually
came out of a hackathon project.
Similar to how Lyft
came out of a hackathon
project for our original
company and products, Zimride,
our ride.lyft project came
out of a hackathon project.
And the reasons why
we built it, you
know, number one, we
wanted to prove that, A,
it was even possible to build
a web app, and possible,
because as Lyft is a native
mobile-first company,
there's a lot of
skepticism as to can
it really match the performance
and usability and user
experience of our
iOS and Android apps?
But more so, the main use cases
were number one, greater reach.
So we wanted to
be able to support
unsupported age-out devices,
as we, for example, eventually
deprecate older OSs.
Number two, essentially
reduce friction.
So pushing users
through an app store
is very, very inefficient.
Right, so being able
to optimize on that.
And then finally, a little
bit more on faster deploys
and experimentation.
So certainly deploying code,
fixes, experiments, A/B testing
on web, takes hours, not weeks.
ERIC BIDELMAN: So let me
ask a little bit about that,
because I've built a few PWAs
myself, certainly probably not
as large as Lyft or an
application like that.
But are you guys
iterating quicker?
How do you get the performance?
Like, there's some
really cool things
you guys are doing in the app.
MALCOLM ONG: Yeah, definitely.
I mean, I think our team
worked on the alpha roughly
two months, it took us, with
just a couple engineers.
And we slowly
built that team up.
And we rebuilt the entire stack
on react to a beta version.
And that only took
about one month, really.
So productivity was
very, very quick.
We were able to do it
a lot faster-- in fact,
four times faster than
our native usually moves.
And so from a performance
standpoint, from a productivity
standpoint, timeline
perspective,
it was definitely
smooth sailing.
ERIC BIDELMAN: That's awesome.
So one last thing.
Where can people
actually try this out?
MALCOLM ONG: Yeah, just go to
ride.lyft.com, and check it
out.
We'd love your feedback.
It's very much a very
early preview of the beta.
But there will be bugs.
So just reach out to us
if you find those bugs.
But yeah, check it out.
ERIC BIDELMAN: That's awesome.
I'm super excited about that.
So check that out.
We're here at CDS all day
today, so check out our stuff
on YouTube, #ChromeDevSummit.
We'll see you guys later.
