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Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

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Re: Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

#21

Post by judah »

yeahgoodok wrote: post #16

What's the sense in publishing your PWA in the Play Store? Chrome already prompts the user if they'd like to install a PWA shortcut when you visit the site. I ask because it costs $25 and while I have a lot of time on my hands I'm a cheap ass.

> "What's the sense in publishing your PWA in the Store?

We've trained a generation of users to look for apps in app stores. I blogged about this here[0], but having your PWA in app stores means more users for your app.

[0]: https://debuggerdotbreak.judahgabriel.com/2018/04/13/i-built...

Re: Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

#22

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

butz wrote: post #18
yeahgoodok wrote: post #16

What's the sense in publishing your PWA in the Play Store? Chrome already prompts the user if they'd like to install a PWA shortcut when you visit the site. I ask because it costs $25 and while I have a lot of time on my hands I'm a cheap ass.

Discoverability. Users browsing Play Store might see your app in related apps list or in search results. And you will get a way to gather user feedback without hosting and moderating forum or discussion board. Also, we are still at the point when you tell user to download an app, one usually goes to Play/App Store, not searches the web.

Also Businesses which has no use for an app, can claim 'We have an app' as many like to do and now they can convert their website to a publishable app more easily.

Re: Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

#23

Post by judah »

butz wrote: post #20

Firefox needs to catch up on PWA support for desktop, Safari too.

Yes. For Firefox desktop, here's the open case[0].

I and many others would love to see Firefox supporting installable PWAs. :-)

[0]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1407202

Re: Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

#24

Post by no_gravity »

judah wrote: post #19
no_gravity wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate why it could be a good thing for users? Not being able to reliably store data on the device means that PWAs have to send the users data over the internet and store it on an external server. I would think users rather do not like that. I am only talking about installed PWAs here. Of course not every website should be able to avoid having its cookies deleted.

"Good for users" was in the context of PWAs, not installed PWAs. Clearly the user's expectation is that clearing browsing data will clear data for web apps they navigate to in the browser. Installed PWAs is another question. I suspect users will be surprised if they clear their browsing data only to discover they have to login again to Twitter, for example. I may raise this question to the Edge Chromium team. I'm cer…

Keeping the user logged in is not the issue. A PWA can inject a unique ID into the installation in various ways.

The problem is the data. Imagine a text editor where all your text documents are gone after you cleared the data of a different app, the browser.

I wrote a fitness app as a PWA some time ago and its pretty annoying to download all the instruction videos again every time you clear your "browser data". Plus all infos about which exercises you did and when is gone for good of course.

Re: Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

#25

Post by Nightshaxx »

judah wrote: post #6
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off-topic, but... why? Is it lower friction to start up your team's blog on Medium versus the unified blog platform larger Microsoft teams tend to use?

PWABuilder is an open source project and builds cross platform web apps. We feel Medium is a better fit than the more corporate structured blogs. So far we've been pretty happy with Medium. That said, we have been mulling building our own blogging platform using our own tools and web components for the sake of dogfooding.

You might want to customize it a bit more to make it clear this is an offical blog. For a few seconds when reading this on mobile I was super confused if this was official or just someone outside MS writing about it.

Re: Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

#26

Post by yeahgoodok »

judah wrote: post #21
yeahgoodok wrote: post #16

What's the sense in publishing your PWA in the Play Store? Chrome already prompts the user if they'd like to install a PWA shortcut when you visit the site. I ask because it costs $25 and while I have a lot of time on my hands I'm a cheap ass.

> "What's the sense in publishing your PWA in the Store? We've trained a generation of users to look for apps in app stores. I blogged about this here[0], but having your PWA in app stores means more users for your app. [0]: https://debuggerdotbreak.judahgabriel.com/2018/04/13/i-built...

I actually had just read this blog post prior to posting my comment. There's a lot of good insight on HOW to publish but I didn't see any compelling evidence on WHY to publish (specific traffic numbers, etc).

Re: Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

#27

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

Nice, I like the way Microsoft chose to ignore the bad blood with Google regarding its apps for Windows Phone and has embraced Android.

PWA collaboration seems to be a step in the right direction, especially since Edge is using chromium and Microsoft seems to be building great PWA apps[1].

Although I'm not entirely sure about Google's end game with PWA[2], I hope these kind of collaboration motivates industries to build more PWA apps and put pressure on Apple to properly support PWA APIs in Safari; then may be, just may be one day we'll have fair grounds for new mobile operating systems to compete without this Playstore/Appstore duopoly.

[1]https://www.bing.com/covid/

[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23574697

Re: Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

#28

Post by kinlan »

no_gravity wrote: post #8

The main problem I see in PWAs these days is that they cannot permanently store data on the device. As soon as the user deletes their "browser data", all the data of the PWAs on the device is lost too. If PWAs would get their own permanent storage like other apps, it would be a huge step forward.

You can request persistent storage that isn't cleared.

Re: Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

#29

Post by davrous »

no_gravity wrote: post #8

The main problem I see in PWAs these days is that they cannot permanently store data on the device. As soon as the user deletes their "browser data", all the data of the PWAs on the device is lost too. If PWAs would get their own permanent storage like other apps, it would be a huge step forward.

They can thanks to the Native File System API coming with Project Fugu: https://web.dev/native-file-system/. Available via origin trial for now but it should be soon released more broadly.

Re: Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better

#30

Post by davrous »

Nightshaxx wrote: post #25
judah wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PWABuilder is an open source project and builds cross platform web apps. We feel Medium is a better fit than the more corporate structured blogs. So far we've been pretty happy with Medium. That said, we have been mulling building our own blogging platform using our own tools and web components for the sake of dogfooding.

You might want to customize it a bit more to make it clear this is an offical blog. For a few seconds when reading this on mobile I was super confused if this was official or just someone outside MS writing about it.

Thanks for this feedback. We're thinking about hosting a blogging platform directly under pwabuilder.com. We've got a small team that was mainly focused on writing new features & code but we definitely need to better address our blogging approach.
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