Hey Paul, thanks for the comment. I understand, but to be honest I can’t accept it as an excuse. Of course Google doesn’t own me anything (well, we can discuss that hehe) so it’s fair to say I shouldn’t be claiming anything to the company.

However, we shouldn’t forget we are talking about an operating system with two billion active users monthly. Two billion. That’s a quarter of Earth’s population. And we are also talking about the technology the Chrome team is investing a lot of time, effort and even money, from PWAs tours to everything you are doing to promote the technology. I can’t believe there was no time or resources or enough priority to ship a new OS version without harming PWAs if the solution is around the corner. I don’t know the internal fights that I’m sure are constantly there, but as an outsider and someone who has been promoting the Web platform for a while, I don’t like the final result. Yes, WebAPK might ship in a couple of months and solve most of the issues stated here, but it feels like it should be here today with Android Oreo launch.

When the Android team decided to change the shortcut behavior, it’s clear they didn’t think on PWAs. They didn’t care about it. I might be wrong, but that’s the public image that we see from the outside. Several browsers with a broken behavior? Automatic Badging and Shaping for PWAs?

If Google can’t prioritize PWAs, how companies will decide to invest and prioritize in the platform? If at any OS update the PWA experience can break with “no guarantee”, we are one a step backward.

And of course Google can set its priorities, but don’t lie to the community. In fact, this lack of priority is in line with my critics about last Google IO. And I know this may be a hard time for the Chrome and PWA team, to give an answer on decisions that are out of your hands, I’m not arguing you on this.

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    Maximiliano Firtman

    Written by

    mobile+web developer, author, trainer, speaker | firt.mobi

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