Samsung “Global Goals Web” Debuts
By: Laura Morinigo
Tags: Pwa, Global Goals, Samsung, Web Development, United Nations

Samsung “Global Goals Web” Debuts

Supporting the Sustainable Development Goals with the wide reach of the Web

Not long ago, Samsung introduced its Global Goals partnership with the UN as a way to help fight inequality, plan to eliminate hunger and clean up the planet. The initiative, developed by a team in Samsung Research America, was a great way to discover each of the 17 goals agreed by the world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly in 2015. The app (linked below), is a great way to put your device to work for the greater good, features interesting wallpapers, information, and allows you to display ads on the lock screen to earn revenue for donations. This app is available for every Android device so you can start earning donations now (see link below).

At Samsung Internet, we believe that the web is a powerful place to share information and use it for good, therefore we’ve decided to bring Global Goals to the web, making it a cross-platform web app and available for everybody. Even further, we believe that users deserve a good experience regardless of the platform they are using or the connection available, say hello to Samsung Global Goals PWA!

Global Goals in desktop

This is our first soft launch and we hope that more users can be updated with the latest news about Global Goals regardless of the device that they are using. During this first approach, the idea is to make available the latest content of global goals:

Meet the 17 goals: Learn about each goal, check which projects are related to it, and choose the one that you want to support.

Learn the facts: View the facts and figures related to each goal and the different areas they’re trying to improve.

Track worldwide donations: Monitor the donations of each goal worldwide so you are able to see the progress of each project.

Samsung and Goals: Learn how Samsung supports each goal and how the company applies its principles related to its products and work environment.

Keep up to the latest news: Whether it’s a podcast, a video, or help with a survey, users can follow up on the latest content of each goal and give direct feedback to the United Nations.

Technology:

As we mentioned before we decided to create a Progressive Web App that allows users to keep the same native experience, with the ability to install their app and have direct access to it within an icon. We’ve also added the capability to work offline, using caching strategies and service workers to make the most important content available and provide a more friendly interaction. We are going to explain further details about the architecture in coming posts but let’s have a quick review of the technology that we’ve used:

Vanilla JS: Simple Javascript, no frameworks, to manage the front end and create a fast and light web application.

One UI Web: It’s a library inspired in the One UI design pattern created by Samsung which allows us to have smooth responsive user interaction.

Node JS: In order to communicate with external APIs and manage the information received in the back end, we’ve decided to keep it under Javascript and choose Node.

Firebase Hosting: Firebase helped us to have an easier way to host our web app and provide a nice URL for free!

Our milestone

As a very first soft launch we are looking to receive feedback from the developer community, so please don’t hesitate to contact us using our twitter.

For our beta launch, the next steps would be looking to add web ads and web payment within donations to keep it closer to the native app and have a real impact within each Global Goal.

Thanks to Samsung SRA Team and our colleague Diego González that made such a wonderful effort during this adventure.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!