Twitter’s mobile website, mobile.twitter.com, is probably the best mainstream progressive web app available right now. Twitter Lite has been available for a while, offering better data usage, combined with a stripped down Twitter experience on mobile devices. Even though Twitter Lite was built for mobile devices, many used the app as their primary Twitter client on desktop, primarily because of how well it works.

Until today, though, the app looked like a poorly designed mobile website on desktops, unless you resized your browser window to be really small. This week, Twitter quietly started rolling out a new update to Twitter Lite, introducing a responsive experience for desktops. The “new” Twitter Lite works exactly the same as before on mobile devices, but on desktops, you will now see a new sidebar just like you do on the full-fledged Twitter.com.

The first main difference between Twitter.com and Twitter Lite on the desktop is the position of the sidebar — Twitter has placed the sidebar on the right-hand side instead of the left-hand side on Twitter Lite, which is a fascinating UX decision. Functionality wise, you are getting a much faster experience on Twitter Lite, including the ability to enable Data Saver to stop images from automatically loading. Twitter Lite is the first client to support its new Bookmarks feature which lets you save tweets for later, and that’s available on desktops too.

Twitter Lite also features Twitter’s new and brilliant Explore page where you can keep track of the world trends, top Twitter Moments, top articles in your network, and a curated list of tweets from your interests. Twitter recently upgraded its search experience on mobile devices to show more content from your network and things that you are interested in, and it’s surprisingly accurate.

The revamped experience for desktops is certainly not complete, as features like New Tweet or Reply still take up the whole page on desktops. Either way. you can checkout Twitter’s improved Lite app here.

Tagged with PWA, Twitter, Twitter Lite