Pulse, the popular mobile news reading app for Android and iOS, made its first foray into the web last week. Today, the company’s CEO Akshay Kothari told me that the launch has been a massive success for his company. Pulse signed up over 100,000 new users through its web app since it launched 7 days ago and its users have now read over 1 million stories on the site already.
Kothari also told me that he was surprised to see that over 60% of the web app’s new users prefer to use Facebook to sign up over setting up a new Pulse account. What didn’t surprise him, however, was that the app’s users are very active and read more stories per session on the web than on mobile.
It took Pulse quite a while before the team decided to branch out from its mobile apps, but the move is clearly paying off now that the company can offer its service on all major platforms.
A web version, Kothari told me when the web app first launched last week, was always among the most requested features for Pulse, but the team wanted to ensure that it could deliver the same kind of high-quality reading experience on the web as on mobile.
From start to finish, it took the Pulse team about 9 months to develop the web app and the company got a little help from Microsoft and the developers at Pixel Lab in the process. Thanks to this, the web app is optimized for a Windows 8 touch-screen experience in Metro mode but also works just as well on any other modern browser.
