Microsoft and Google team up to bring PWAs to the Play Store

PWA Progressive Web Apps Icon 1

Microsoft has joined forces with Google to help developers get their Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) into the Play Store. Microsoft has its own PWABuilder tool, and Bubblewrap is a tool from Google. Both companies are working together to make their tools interoperate.

Earlier this year Microsoft started working together with Google to make PWABuilder utilize Bubblewrap under the hood. As the result, two new features for PWA developers are now available for developers.

  1. Web shortcuts support: PWAs packaged for Google Play via PWABuilder will now support the new web shortcuts standard. It enables installed PWAs to have app shortcuts, a contextual list of common actions that users can quickly jump to
  2. Advanced Android features & customization: PWABuilder now supports the full range of trusted web activity options that makes your PWA shine on Android devices. From PWABuilder, you can customize the appearance of the Android status bar and nav bar in your PWA, customize your Android splash screen, change your launcher name, use an existing signing key, utilize deeper push notification support, configure your package’s ID and versioning, fallback behavior and more.

The support happens automatically; no extra work required. Shortcuts you define in your web app manifest will work in your Google Play Store APK package as one might expect them to. As users discover and install your PWA in the Google Play Store, they’ll be able to easily re-engage with your app through web shortcuts.

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Author: Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.

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