Microsoft has been collaborating with Google to ensure that their tools interoperate and can help developers get their Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) into the Play Store.

“We’re glad to announce a new collaboration between Microsoft and Google for the benefit of the web developer community,” Microsoft’s Judah Gabriel Himango announced. “Microsoft’s PWABuilder and Google’s Bubblewrap are now working together to help developers publish PWAs in the Google Play Store.”

As Himango explains, PWABuilder is a Microsoft tool that helps developers build PWAs from existing websites and publish them in app stores, while Bubblewrap is a Google tool and library used to generate and sign Google Play Store packages from PWAs.

After months of collaboration, the two firms have made some interesting progress towards integrating the tools. Now, PWABuilder utilizes Bubblewrap “under the hood,” as Himango puts it, allowing developers to package PWAs for the Play Store with PWABuilder that support the new web shortcuts standard. (On Windows 10, web shortcuts appear as jump lists.)

And PWABuilder also now supports the full range of trusted web activity options that helps PWAs work better on Android. That is, developers can now customize the appearance of the Android status bar and nav bar in their PWAs using PWABuilder, and can customize the app splash screen, change the launcher name, use an existing signing key, utilize deeper push notification support, configure package ID and versioning, fallback behavior, and more.

“Google and Microsoft are working together to make the web a more capable app platform,” Himango concludes. “We’re also collaborating with Google on Project Fugu to incubate new web platform features, with PWAs front and center, toward the goal of standardization so everyone benefits.”

You can learn more about Project Fugu capabilities here.

Tagged with Progressive Web Apps, PWAs