Publishing a PWA to App Stores
The journey from a browser-based PWA to the Google Play Store, App Store and Microsoft Store
by Maximiliano Firtman
During International JavaScript Conference 2020 (online) I delivered this talk to understand the journey of publishing a PWA to App Stores.
Today, Google Play store, kaiOS Store, and the Microsoft Store accept Progressive Web Apps. Join me in the journey of taking a PWA for browsers and making everything available for stores, including creating a Trusted Web Activity with Android Studio, using WebIDE for feature phones, and making an APPX for Windows 10. We will also talk about the App Store, what's possible and what's not on iOS and iPadOS.
Today Progressive Web Apps can be installed on every desktop and mobile operating system from the browser, but app store availability is also possible thanks to a couple of different official (and non-official) solutions such as Trusted Web Activities for Android, or PWAs for the Microsoft Store.
In this talk, we will go through the process of creating PWA Launchers for iOS, Android, Windows, and feature phones. We'll discuss the responsibility of Service Workers when working with PWA launchers and how JavaScript can extend the Web Platform calling native APIs when a PWA launcher is involved with real-world examples of what's possible. For enterprise developers, we'll analyze how we can distribute PWAs for iOS through Mobile Configuration files, and PWAs for Android through Managed Google Play iframe.