
How do I notify users that my PWA is installable? - feross
https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/06/pwa-install-patterns
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mycall
This is pretty popular javascript to notify user.

[https://github.com/cubiq/add-to-homescreen](https://github.com/cubiq/add-to-
homescreen)

Also available in NPM

[https://www.npmjs.com/package/add-to-
homescreen](https://www.npmjs.com/package/add-to-homescreen)

------
Ill_ban_myself
Is this a joke? Do people using android devices regularly "install" websites
to their phones?

I'm not sure if the author is pulling my leg or if Google is planning some
kind of proprietary android specific PWA component...

~~~
shaftway
I think there are some advantages to "installing" PWAs to your phone. As I
understand it you're grabbing a ball of HTML, CSS, Javascript, a bunch of
assets, and whatever else your website needs and presenting it in a chromeless
browser (a browser without UI, not without Chrome).

If your PWA has significant offline capability, this can be useful. Think of
Google Drive on a laptop. You can enable offline mode, which essentially saves
a similar ball of assets to your cache and saves copies of your files to local
storage. You can use most of the capabilities offline just like you were
online (obviously not anything that actually requires internet).

There are advantages to appear like an app to the user. User's tend to assume
"If I have no internet, websites don't work" which obviously isn't the case
with drive in offline mode. But it's hard to fight that. The expectation
around apps is that they generally do work offline, so it tricks / socially-
engineers / whatever the user into that assumption.

~~~
Ill_ban_myself
so the idea is to use a native app thin shell around your pwa to get access to
local storage and all the user's mobile data? How is this different than the
way in which a blackbox like Flash breaks the security sandbox? How is this
not ripe for abuse?

~~~
feross
You still have the same permissions as any other website. Chrome makes and
manages the APK.

