PWA discoverability

I think the main reason why you would want to do this is discoverability. When I talk about a PWA to “normal” people 😜, first thing they want to do is look it up at the Play/App store. When I say “just go to 1tuner.com and add to home screen”, I see question marks in their eyes 😕.

So just show the website in a WebView I thought, and found https://medium.com/@stevesohcot/andriod-studio-webview-tutorial-4651701d7d1a.
However, this has some disadvantages. By using the WebView, you don’t seem to have APIs like Web Share and Media Session API by default. Also the app was being silenced after a while (I guess battery saving kicked in or something). Maybe these problems should be able to fix by mixing it up with native app code, or by using a framework, but that was not what I wanted…

Finally, I did publish it as app. But because this version was some kind of broken, I never told anyone and kept this as a secret (ssst!). Too bad it’s not allowed to put “Don’t install this app, it’s broken — just go to 1tuner.com!” in the description 😁.

See Google Play Store now open for Progressive Web Apps 😱.
I’ve updated my broken app to use this approach and now it behaves like you would add it via your browser.
After installing the app from the Play Store, you will see a “Running in Chrome” bar at the bottom of the screen.

This is to notify the user — as Paul Kinlan explains:

I must say that I like this, so you can see & decide where your preferences will be stored. Unfortunately this is not what I have when installing my own app, so it must be something that has to be configured somehow.

But then I realised this whole PWA install process is not that OK. Don’t get me wrong, this is the best we can have now. But just installing (“add to home screen” / as webAPK) from your browser feels much better. I think a normal user won’t understand the difference between a web app and native app in the Play Store right now.

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