from Hacker News

Google Play Store Now Open for Progressive Web Apps

by jbuild on 2/1/19, 7:37 PM with 78 comments

• by osrec on 2/2/19, 12:37 AM

  One of the wonderful things about a PWA is that it is so freeing (no app store gods to appease for approval etc etc). I'm a little afraid that putting PWAs in an app store may actually reduce the flexibility they offer by restricting what PWAs can and can't do. Then again, an app store may be a necessary to allow PWAs to diffuse into mainstream usage.

  Personally, I am looking forward to the day PWAs are considered on par with native apps by the general populace. I think we're getting there in terms of functionality and flexibility - I run https://usebx.com/app which is a PWA, and my users are pretty happy with the functionality it delivers on all platforms. It also helped me launch with a smaller budget, since it's a single code base that runs on desktop, mobile or tablet.

  The one thing I will add is that building a high-quality, performant PWA is significantly harder than building a native app - why? because you really need to understand the workings of modern browsers to squeeze native like performance, and unfortunately, in my experience, very few web developers have that depth of understanding. I have been building web apps for 20 years (I started young), but when I decided to build Bx as a PWA, I had to learn a lot to achieve the quality I desired.

• by int_19h on 2/2/19, 5:02 AM

  It's amusing that Microsoft is still the one embracing PWAs most - Win10 app store allows to publish them directly (you have to upload a package, but all that package contains is the URL for the actual app, and name and icon for the store). But then there's also Bing PWA crawler which finds and adds existing apps.

  It's literally the reverse of early 00s, when Microsoft was entrenched with rich desktop GUIs, and everybody else was hoping that web apps would be the way out of that lock-in. And now iOS and Android are the rich UI lock-in...

• by 75dvtwin on 2/1/19, 11:36 PM

  Will the developer need to give 30% of the progressive app price to Google (if it is in the play store)?

  sorry in advance, if this has already been mentioned somewhere.

• by abrowne on 2/2/19, 12:05 AM

  > TWAs work only with Chrome today, but the API might be also cloned by other browsers, such as Samsung Internet, Edge or Firefox in the future.

  It's too bad it's Chrome-only now. But very good that using another engine is even possible.

• by thinkingemote on 2/2/19, 12:58 AM

  Can a user have as much control over a PWA as it's running in a browser instance compared to loading the site in regular Firefox mobile?

  In other words are PWA a way for people to write and run web apps but making sure the user can't run adblockers?

• by jameslk on 2/2/19, 1:17 AM

  PWAs along with Web Payments and WebAssembly seems like it will make big changes to the way the web works. It's blurring the line with web and native even further.

• by sandGorgon on 2/2/19, 3:15 AM

  There has been a production TWA in the Play Store for a while now - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

  Works brilliantly.

• by jadbox on 2/2/19, 9:48 PM

  Is there a way for me to tell TWA to then tell Chrome to report itself different in the meta data? There are services that I use that do not work properly when the source identifies itself as a mobile browser. Currently with Cordova, you have have it change the headers on all requests to report a different browser OS.

• by tonetheman on 2/2/19, 1:34 PM

  This is cool but I tried yesterday to figure out what was going on in the samples and it still super green.

  It looks like you have to still write Android code to do this. There is a sample that has no code in it ... but it is not documented.

  Hopefully over time they will get the process worked out.

• by z3t4 on 2/2/19, 2:19 PM

  It would make a lot of sense to use Node.JS as a backend service for your web app, instead of a Java app. It's much easier for a web developer to use JavaScript then to learn Java, or Objective C. The API would be implemented with Node.JS modules.

• by burtonator on 2/2/19, 3:19 AM

  This is actually huge news. I'm really excited about this!

  I'm the author of a document management and annotation platform named Polar:

  https://getpolarized.io/

  I'm working on the web+mobile version built on Firebase.

  The PWA should be straight forward but don't want to have to build another mobile app for it.

  With PWA this is going to be 100x easier.

  Additionally, the Play Store is a major source of new users.

  One of the things most independent app developers don't think about is distribution.

  Being in the Play Store means people have another chance to find your app!