Progressive Web Apps (often shortened to PWAs) are web apps designed to closely mirror the functionality of native apps, with features like offline support and notifications. Earlier this year, Google introduced a new technology for compiling PWAs into Android apps for submission to the Play Store, and now Samsung is inviting web apps to its Galaxy Store.

While there was nothing preventing developers from submitting PWAs to the Galaxy Store already (either running inside a Trusted Web Activity or a WebView wrapper), Samsung is treating web apps a little differently. Developers only need to submit the URL of their app to the store, instead of going through the time-consuming process of writing an APK. This might change as time goes on, but after spending hours creating a native wrapper for one of my web apps so I could publish it to the Play Store, I have to give points to Samsung here.

"To further integrate PWAs into the Samsung experience," the company wrote in a blog post, "we have started adding PWAs to the Samsung Galaxy Store, placing Web App experiences alongside apps." However, there doesn't seem to be a way to actually install web apps from the Galaxy Store yet, only run them directly. Baby steps, I suppose.

If you're a web developer, Samsung has instructions for submitting apps at the source link below. Web apps are only available in the US Galaxy Store right now, but the company hopes to "roll it out to the rest of the world at a later date."

Source: Medium