Publishing a Mendix PWA in the Google Play Store

Native and hybrid mobile apps can be distributed via the Google Play Store, this of course is also possible with a Mendix PWA using PWABuilder (https://www.pwabuilder.com/).

Publishing a Mendix PWA in the Google Play Store — Image description: the Mendix Logo with an arrow pointing to PWA with another arrow pointing to the Google Play Store Logo

PWABuilder was founded by Microsoft as a community-guided, open-source project to help move PWA adoption forward.

How to use PWABuilder to package your app for Distribution

Below are the steps you can take to package the app using PWABuilder and publish it on the Google play console.

1. Your Mendix app needs to be published as a PWA from app navigation in the modeler and hosted in the Mendix cloud.

2. Go to PWABuilder and enter the URL of your Mendix app and click on start.

PWABuilder

3. The PWA report card and action items will be generated as below.

4. Once action items are addressed and on click of ‘Package For Stores’, the below pop-up is generated.

5. On click of ‘Generate Package’ on the Android tile, a pop-up page will be presented to customize the app settings for Google play.

6. Once you enter the application details, click on ‘Download Package’. The package will now be ready for download.

7. Downloaded package (.zip format) is extracted which has the app in the format of .aab which needs to be uploaded to the Google play console with your Google developer account.

After downloading your app package, you can follow these guides by Google on how to submit your application to the Play Store.

Create and set up your app

Publish your app

8. If you would like to remove the browser address bar in the app, you can follow the steps mentioned in the below link:

https://github.com/pwa-builder/CloudAPK/blob/master/Next-steps.md

Note: the well-known folder can be created under the theme folder of your Mendix app directory and the changes need to be redeployed to the Mendix cloud environment.

Conclusion

By using PWABuilder to package our PWA for distribution on the Google Play Store, we can overcome one difference of PWA over native and hybrid mobile apps, thereby giving the same user experience as other mobile apps.

Read more

PWABuilder Suite Documentation

Progressive Web App

Google Play Console | Google Play Console

From the Publisher -

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