Migrating from PWA to native app for 5x wider reach

Attico’s team wrapped up a project turning a Progressive Web App (PWA) into a native mobile app. This shift made it easier to reach a broader audience, with the application becoming available on the App Store and Google Play.

PWA to native mobile app conversion for healthcare

Customer

A Fortune 500 multinational food and beverage corporation

Industry

FMCG

Services

Mobile development

Mobile

Overview

The customer is a Switzerland-based non-profit association that unites more than 300,000 medical practitioners over the globe. It shares leading science-based knowledge with healthcare professionals, nutrition, and scientific communities.

Alongside being one of the largest private publishers of nutrition papers and journals, the organization also runs internationally recognized workshops and symposia. All of this content is freely available to registered users through its education website and mobile app.

“We always try to leverage whatever we have. In this case it made a lot of sense to use MAP — we were happy to use Drupal for content management and user authentication, as it was an already approved system. Then we simply added a mobile interface on top of that.”
Client’s representative

Challenge

The client needed to provide healthcare professionals with a world of nutrition at their fingertips. While a PWA was initially built, its limitations on iOS — including no automatic installation prompts, lack of push notifications, restricted access to device features, and inconsistent user experiences — led to the decision to build a native app. Transforming a PWA into a native application proved challenging due to the following constraints:

Product scope

Need to deliver a unified native application for both iOS and Android users.

Migration complexity

PWA-to-native conversion with reuse of prior project learnings and minimized delivery risks.

Security constraints

Mandatory compliance with the client’s internal security scan procedures across all builds and releases.

Tech gaps

Implementation of native functionalities not present in the original PWA, requiring additional research and experimentation.

Our approach

Attico’s team converted an existing client’s PWA to a native app for both iOS and Android. The solution preserved Drupal as the backend and introduced the Mobile App Platform (MAP) — Attico’s proprietary tool — to standardize their several mobile applications to align with the brand style. The native app was developed over six months and passed several important stages.

Design

Our team redesigned the app interface in Figma, reworked the UI specifically for mobile, and aligned it with both iOS and Android design guidelines. We also created a set of reusable components, including buttons, typography, and colors, to ensure a consistent UX, faster development, and better scalability for the client going forward.

Development

We took a structured and collaborative approach, breaking the project into specific frontend and backend tasks that could be delivered in parallel. This workflow streamlined development and accelerated the implementation of the app’s core functionality.

Closed beta testing

Our specialists offered a small group of people to test the app on iOS and Android before the official release. This stage showed how the app works in real life and allowed us to gather initial real user feedback. We identified bugs and shortcomings and adjusted the product before the public launch.

Security scan

Every product the client releases goes through a security scan after any major update using their internal tool. Attico’s QA team ran a full security scan of the app, checked functionality on both iOS and Android, identified and fixed minor issues found during testing, and made adjustments based on the feedback received.

Release

At the release stage, everything went smoothly on Android, while on iOS, the Apple team had a few comments that we quickly addressed within a week. Our developers made the transition from the PWA to the native app as seamless as possible — all user accounts and settings were preserved, so people just needed to install the new version from the store or follow a link from a notification in the PWA.

Implementation highlights

Attico’s team successfully turned the PWA into a native mobile app, keeping Drupal as the backend as requested by the client to standardize their other applications to align with the brand. This included:

Migrating the existing PWA into a native app integrated for better agility, enhanced functionality, wider reach, and harmonization
Doing additional research and hands-on testing to pass security checks and implement features that weren’t part of the original solution
Ensuring compatibility with the client’s ecosystem, including architecture and a proprietary tool for managing a Drupal distribution

Results

We helped the client expand their mobile reach by introducing a native app while preserving Drupal as a centralized backend. Our team also standardized multiple mobile apps to ensure consistent brand alignment across the entire ecosystem.

Business impact

5x higher native app downloads compared to PWA in the first weeks after launch
Balanced user base across iOS and Android platforms, improving cross-platform reach
At least a 50% reduction in development costs and time-to-market by using MAP

Marketing impact

Brand harmonization across multiple mobile applications and platforms
Expanded reach via App Store and Google Play, improving mobile-first discoverability
Increased engagement via native mobile experience and device-level features
Higher conversion from content consumption to event participation and registration

Technical impact

Transition from PWA to native mobile architecture with a decoupled backend using Drupal
Standardized mobile development through MAP with reusable API driven endpoints
Unified design system enabling component reuse and consistent frontend architecture
Simplified mobile maintenance and development through platform-level standardization

Tech insights

The solution uses Drupal as the single backend source of truth, while the mobile experience was rebuilt as a native layer on top of it. This separation allowed backend logic and mobile interfaces to evolve independently without breaking existing functionality. The result was a consistent delivery of key healthcare capabilities, including access to educational content, interactive tools, and decision-support features, across native applications.

Attico’s team behind the project success

Aliaksei Lyzo Backend Developer, Team Lead

Can discuss about digitalisation for hours. Pays great attentions to details. Security and GDPR expert.

Volha Tsiamliak Frontend Developer, Team Lead

Superorganised. Fan of new frameworks and Design System. Turns blockers into breakthroughs.

Katsiaryna Kuchmel QA Engineer

Analytical and detail-oriented, focused on finding defects and delivering products that meet high standards.

Sviatlana Kutayeva Frontend Developer

Enjoys creating user-friendly and visually appealing interfaces. Open to learning new things.

If you are planning a migration from PWA to native mobile apps or looking to scale your digital ecosystem across mobile environments, Attico helps you design the architecture.

Related services

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Mobile apps & platforms

Our team has an extensive mobile development expertise to build robust and scalable mobile platforms for your needs. We build robust and scalable Drupal-based apps that run seamlessly on both iOS and Android.

Quality engineering

Attico provides quality engineering services integrated into your development process, including test strategy development, manual and automated testing. We help you achieve high product quality and accelerate releases.

Design

Design & user experience

At Attico, we combine UX research, digital user experience design, and interface design to make digital platforms easier to navigate, easier to maintain, and ready to scale.

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