Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are coming and you can full expect a slew of them by the time we reach the end of 2018. Google, Apple, Microsoft and Firefox have all committed to having support for PWAs, which are web sites that run like mobile apps on your phone or laptop. Now Google has upped their game with Chrome OS and PWAs.
In the Chrome OS Canary Channel, the pre-alpha channel for the platform, you can now install Progressive Web Apps natively so they run just like a Chrome app on your Chromebook. It is great news because it means that more-than-likely, by the end of summer, we will see PWA support natively in the Stable Channel.
How it works is pretty straightforward. If you go to a PWA enabled site like https://mobile.twitter.com, http://open.spotify.com/, https://guitar-tuner.appspot.com/ and https://www.pokedex.org/, you can go to Menu>More Tools and you will see the option to Install. This will allow you to “install” the Progressive Web App and even pin it to your shelf on your Chromebook.
The discovery of this was found by long time Chrome OS evangelist François Beaufort and he posted about it on his G+ profile.
We are still many months away from seeing this native support in the stable channel but for those of you who happen to have a device in the Chrome OS Canary Channel, the feature is enabled by default so you should be able to give it a try and see what you think.
