Google and Microsoft teamed up to improve web apps on Android

Photo: Rami Al-zayat

From: Unsplash

As reported By SlashGear, Google and Microsft are teaming up to make Progressive web apps to work more efficiently on Android and to encourage developers to make more web apps for smartphones. Because of so many platforms from Windows to Mac OS and iOS to Android, many developers will take years to develop separate apps for all the platforms, this is especially true in the case of single developers or a small team of developers.

But there are a few solutions for this, both Google and Microsoft have released frameworks and tools previously like Qt or Google’s Flutter that will help developers to create apps for different platforms at the same time and this has reduced some burden for app developers but progressive web apps which are intended to work on any platform that uses a standards-compliant browser will be a more efficient solution for building apps for several platforms.

Both Google and Microsoft have developer kits to make PWAs, Bubblewrap by Google, and PWAbuilder by Microsoft, these kits will help developers to make normal web apps integrate with the underlying OS-specific features to make them work just like native apps. Now both are joining hands to bring more PWAs to mobile and improve the current ones, Google's Bubblewrap will help make Play Store packages out of PWAs and PWAbuilders' functionality is the same.

Microsoft said that PWAbuilder will use Bubblewrap under the hood and it will give back some integration features to PWAs on Android. "Specifically, PWAs packaged for Google Play Store will be able to support web shortcuts that let users jump directly to specific sections or parts of the web app," SlashGear wrote.

PWAs will also support for customization like changing the color of the status bar, "Google and Microsoft are leaning hard on PWAs for their own reasons. Microsoft is trying to make up for the lack of apps on its Store by letting existing web apps publish there as PWAs. Google, on the other hand, benefits from PWAs by having a single app story that encompasses all its existing platforms and uses the platform that it knows best: the Web," According to SlashGear.