Paul Kinlan
Aug 22, 2017 · 2 min read

I just want to reply to a couple of points:

I think your Habit and Discoverability points are actually the same, and I think that they long-term will be less impactful that people think they will be.

When your potential users wants an instantly loading, offline capable, home screen positioned air horn experience, you want to be there for them where they’ll be looking for it.

Love the plug, I love that you can use my app without an install. :)

While the Play Store search function is surprisingly, erm, not-great, users will on occasion look through the app stores, search a little, to see what the latest and greatest stuff they could be using their phone for these days are.

App store have ratings, reviews and categorization — all of which will help potential users find your application.

I think I agree with some of this, but I think the impact is less than people would naturally think. The play store is chock full of other applications that the user has to wade through. As a developer you already have the reach through the web, either via physical real-world promotion of the URL, search, ads in search, social (FB, Twitter etc) that the overall surface area for discovery is already incredibly high for anything on the web. The Play Store in my opinion is *yet another* channel of many that already exist for web content.

If PWA’s ever got in the play store, I don’t believe it will be as much of a game changer as people hope it will be, it’s more of a tick on the list of channels that users will instantly be able to access. What I don’t think anyone would ever want to see is “User uses PWA, has to go the store to install” which is exactly what happens today for native apps. We want the world where the user is using the site or app and it’s installed if they want it because they are using it.

“If you don’t own the app store position for your app, then someone else definitely will. Create a reasonably popular application, and there will be someone that’ll create an app that poses as yours. Worse yet, as the PWA is publicly available online, you have enabled the ability for malicious developers to embed your entire application inside a WebView, letting them own the experience instead of you.”

This is explicitly not allowed in the store, under the developer terms of conditions. You, as the owner of the brand features (name, title, domains etc) agree to the fact that you own them. Not owning them means your listing can/will be pulled from the store.

Like Microsoft is doing.

I love what Microsoft is doing, but I don’t believe they yet list PWA’s in their stores especially since Service Worker is not yet supported in Edge, but is thankfully being worked on.

Anyway, long-term I’m hopeful on all of this. Appreciate the post you did.

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Paul Kinlan

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Lead for Chrome and Web Developer Relations @ Google. Progressive Web Apps. Launched Web Fundamentals with Web Starter Kit. Mobile BadAss. Mr Web Intents.