Google Is Integrating Progressive Web Apps Deeper Into Android (chromium.org)

Yaron Friedman, a software engineer at Google, writes on Chromium blog: In 2015, we added a new feature to Chrome for Android that allows developers to prompt users to add their site to the Home screen for fast and convenient access. That feature uses an Android shortcut, which means that web apps don't show up throughout Android in the same way as installed native apps. In the next few weeks we'll be rolling out a new version of this experience in Chrome beta. With this new version, once a user adds a Progressive Web App to their Home screen, Chrome will integrate it into Android in a much deeper way than before. For example, Progressive Web Apps will now appear in the app drawer section of the launcher and in Android Settings, and will be able to receive incoming intents from other apps. Long presses on their notifications will also reveal the normal Android notification management controls rather than the notification management controls for Chrome.

Comments

This has a few reasons ...

[Qbertino]

I was at the last two Google Polymer Summits and last years definitely saw a push towards PWAs. One of the reasons Google want's to push these is that it bridges the gap between complex web apps, mobile capable websites and mobile apps. Another quite simple reason is the app-bloat we're alle experiencing on our cellphones. Apps clocking in at 40+ MB and weighing down on Smartphones budgeted memory and storage are a big problem, as are mobile performance hogs that only run satisfyingly on the most modern 1st world smartphones. Many updates people can't make, because the vendors apps are simply growing to big. PWAs are supposed to tackle this problem aswell.

PWAs is Googles attempt to leverage the ubiquity of the open web and offer mechanisms to integrate it further into native plattforms. It's actually quite a stunt, because libs like Polymer try to square the circle in offering web toolkits that are easy to use, mobile ready, powerfull, cross-plattform and still somehow don't weigh down to much on end-user systems. You can imagine what bucketload of work that is and what stunts the developers come up with to tackle this problem, but the crews at Google have come up with some really impressive stuff. Such as storage worker components that stabilise mobile webapps with flaky online uplink. These are basically websites that mask as mobile apps and behave offline just as well as they do online, syncing your stuff only when they have a chance too. There is some quite cool stuff out there in PWA space.

It's all quite some magic, but probably is also an attempt to counterbalance the fragmentation happening in the android space. Build once, run everywhere (iOS, Android, Chrome, Desktop OS, etc. ...) is actually not that far away with PWAs.

I'm experimenting with PWAs, and while they do have a point, they also have the usual problems of squaring the circle. Tricky stuff and once again a scenario that proves building modern feasible non-trivial web-apps actually is quite a serious development task, requireing carefull planning and big, complex pipelines akin to those in regular x-plattform development.