Mobile App and PWA Launch for a Customer-Facing Insurance Platform

The company had no mobile presence. Customer interactions happened through a legacy web portal that was not optimized for mobile use and through phone calls — creating friction at every touchpoint and limiting the company's ability to engage customers in the moments that mattered most. Competitors were moving aggressively toward mobile-first experiences, and customer feedback made it clear that the absence of a modern app was affecting both satisfaction scores and retention.

Building a mobile application presented practical challenges beyond the technical. The company needed a solution that would work across iOS and Android without maintaining two separate codebases, that could be updated and extended without requiring app store review cycles for every change, and that would connect cleanly to the existing backend systems being rebuilt on Azure. The project also needed to meet Apple and Google submission requirements — a process with its own complexity for organizations that had not navigated it before.

The broader modernization work underway on the platform made this the right moment to build mobile — the new Azure backend provided the APIs the mobile layer needed, and building the customer-facing mobile experience on top of the new infrastructure meant it would not need to be rebuilt again when the backend migration completed.

Nextekk built a Progressive Web App (PWA) in React.js that served as the codebase for both the web experience and the native mobile apps distributed through the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. The PWA architecture meant that the majority of the application logic — UI components, business rules, state management — was written once and ran everywhere: in the browser on desktop and mobile, and as the foundation for the app store packages. This approach eliminated the ongoing maintenance burden of separate iOS and Android codebases.

Azure Functions handled the serverless backend logic — policy lookups, document retrieval, notification dispatch, and customer data operations — behind Azure API Management, which provided a consistent, versioned, and secured API surface for the mobile layer to consume. Azure Front Door provided edge caching and security for the web experience, and Azure App Service hosted the PWA shell. The application was designed to work offline for core features, with background sync handling data updates when connectivity was restored.

The Apple App Store and Google Play Store submission process was managed end-to-end — from app icon design and screenshot preparation through review submission, feedback resolution, and approval. Both apps passed first-round review without rejection, which reflects the care taken during development to meet platform guidelines on privacy, data handling, and user experience standards before submission rather than after.

The company launched with a polished, customer-facing mobile application live on both major app stores simultaneously — going from no mobile presence to a complete cross-platform experience in a single engagement. The PWA ensured that customers who preferred not to install an app had access to the same experience through the web, eliminating the friction of platform-specific downloads while still offering native app store distribution for customers who preferred it.

Customer response was immediate and positive. The application's interface — designed specifically for the company's customer workflows rather than adapted from a generic template — received strong feedback from early users. The company now has a mobile-first customer touchpoint that reflects its brand, handles the core customer journeys end-to-end, and is built on an architecture that the internal team can extend as the product roadmap develops. What had been a visible gap in the company's customer offering became a competitive advantage within a single engagement.