Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) coming soon to the Windows Store

PWAs have been launched in 2015, but they are still being discussed and Microsoft is coming up with even better news … it plans to make them fully available to the Windows Store.

What are progressive web apps (PWAs)?

You can imagine this app as a webpage that works and acts as a mobile app. The ever-evolving technologies and new features of Internet browsers allow users to install these PWA applications, place them on the home screen, and work with them even in offline mode.

PWAs use the much larger web ecosystems and plugins compared to native mobile applications, so they can be built in less time, so an API does not need to be maintained with backwards-compatibility (all users will run the same version of your website’s code).

These are the main benefits of PWAs

These benefits include:

• Lower development cost
• Content in PWAs can be easily found by search engines
• Good linkability / interconnection
• Large data savings
• Constant updates

Source: developers.google.com.

Microsoft gives the green light to progressive web apps

At the recent Edge Web Summit 2017, Microsoft announced that PWA will come to Edge next year. But what is even more interesting is that Microsoft will start actively crawling the web for quality PWAs and add them to the Windows Store. Company representatives think that PWA — thanks to their ability to deliver a native app-like experience — could have great potential in the future and change the whole mobile world.

Microsoft Teams will be one of the first

Microsoft Teams is a software offering group chat and is a part of Office 365. Thanks to this workspace you can create different chat channels, share key documents and tools, explore data, get updates from the using apps and so on. Microsoft wants to launch this app (currently available in desktop version only) as one of the first PWAs and add it to the Windows Store. When they will do it is not certain yet… probably next year.