YouTube website now available as a PWA

The lack of a native YouTube app for Windows has always been a sore point, but with the rise of Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) on all platforms, this is becoming much less of an issue.

ChromeUnboxed reports that YouTube is rolling out the wide ability to install their web app as a PWA on both ChromeOS and it appears also Windows. This feature has been available for a few before, but it appears Google has decided to roll it out for everyone recently.

This means on Windows you can now have a start menu or taskbar shortcut to the app, that it will appear chrome-less in ints own window, and that it can be managed (e..g uninstalled) just like any other Windows app.

ChromeUboxed reports that there may be additional good news,

We encourage web developers to make offline supported PWA. Google has reportedly been demanding developers add more offline capability to their PWAs, saying:

We plan to raise the bar of the offline capability check. PWAs that don’t provide at least a basic offline experience, will not show the install prompts.

This suggests Google may be ad some offline capabilities to their YouTube PWA, hopefully including the ability to download videos for offline viewing on a flight or train for example.

To install the YouTube PWA, go to the website and click on the + icon on the right in the address bar.