It appears that the first wave of Progressive Web Apps (PWA) has hit the Microsoft Store, with more than a dozen PWAs now available. More apps will likely make their way soon as well.
Late last month, Twitter updated its long-abandoned Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app for Windows 10 and transitioned it to a Progressive Web App (PWA). PWAs are Microsoft’s latest answer to the app gap, and one that it’s betting that developers will support due to its various advantages. Now, it appears that the first wave of PWAs has hit the Microsoft Store.
As spotted first by Italian website Aggiornamenti Lumia, various PWAs under a new developer handle «Microsoft Store» have made their way to the Store. As can be seen in the image above, these include:
Given the fact they’re published by the «Microsoft Store» suggests that Microsoft may be manually vetting candidates to see which apps best display the power of PWA. A couple of months ago, it stated that it will be using its Bing crawler to index «selected quality» PWAs that it finds on the web. The company claimed that it had 1.5 million candidates at the time, so it’s likely that we’ll see more PWAs make their way to the Store in the near future.
PWAs are hosted on the developer’s servers, rather than Microsoft’s. That means that updates can be pushed without ever submitting an update to the Store. And since it’s a web app, they’re completely cross-platform. The downside is that a developer will have to build a native Universal Windows App (UWA) should they wish to integrate a native feature not available on the web.
Source: Aggiornamenti Lumia via MSPoweruser
