Microsoft plans to bring PWAs for Chromium Edge to the Microsoft Store

Microsoft is planning to bring Chromium Edge PWAs to the Microsoft Store. Last week, the company said it’s working on allowing developers to upload PWAs to the Microsoft Store. Now, Justin Willis, Program Manager on the PAX Web team has published a post on Medium detailing the company’s plan to allow developers to create PWA apps for the Microsoft Store.

The post highlighted some of the advantages of using PWAs and including Web APIs like Shortcuts, Protocol handling, URI handling, File Type Associations and Compatibility with different platforms. Microsoft is recommending users to take advantage of the PWA Builder to create and publish PWAs without writing a lot of code. Justin also highlighted some of the features that worked on EdgeHTML but are not supported on the Chromium framework:

• No support for Live Tiles
• No splash screen
• Missing Analytics in the Partner Center

Things to be aware of during the preview

• If your PWA is already in the Microsoft Store using the EdgeHTML package and a user is logged in, the user will need to re-authenticate in the new Edge package.
• A user needs to have Microsoft Edge installed. If Microsoft Edge is not installed the user will be prompted to install Edge first before installing the app. As we continue our roll-out of Edge, we expect less and less users to hit this.

If you’re a developer and are planning to build PWAs then you can use PWABuilder to try the Preview release of this new Edge PWA package for the Microsoft Store.