Chrome users have been able to add homescreen shortcuts for their favorite websites for years, letting you quickly jump to a site without having to navigate the bookmarks folder, but they’ve always been just that: fancy links. th the latest Chrome beta, wants them to be something far greater.
Called ogressive b Apps, they promise to offer the best of both worlds, allowing users to experience the power of a ay Store app without needing to go through a download or update process. “It loads quickly, even on flaky networks, sends relevant push notifications, has an icon on the home screen, loads as a top-level, full screen experience,” says.
The concept has been around since 2015, but it only just making it available in the beta version of Chrome for Android. How it works is simple: en you visit a ogressive b App, you’ll be able to save it your homescreen like before (via a new Add Shortcut option), except now it won’t just be a fancy link. It will appear in your app drawer alongside everything else you’ve downloaded from the ay Store, it will function just like a native app would, with the same settings, notifications, subscriptions that you would find in a ay Store app.
ogressive b Apps act just like native apps, except you add them to your phone through Chrome.
You’re not even technically running them in Chrome. Once installed, ogressive b Apps launch independently of the browser work even when there isn’t an Internet connection. Updates are done silently in the background, they scale to any screen, most importantly, they feel like a native app. As writes in a blog post:
“This new Add to Home screen feature is one more step in our journey to empower developers to build the best possible experience for their users, we are committed to ensuring the same mechanisms for installing ogressive b Apps are available to all browsers on Android.”
If you want to test them out, you can download Chrome Canary, ’s beta version of Chrome, in the ay Store. Then, navigate to chrome://flags, find the #enable-improved-a2hs experiement, tap the Enable button. (Thanks for the tip, Android lice!) Then, when you visit one of ogressive b Apps, you’ll be able to add it to your phone play around with it. There aren’t too many sites available right now, but you will find a decent smattering of popular apps like lymail, Flipboard, the Financial es.
Once you add it to your app drawer, the ogressive b App (right) is indistinguishable from a native app.
This could be the future of mobile: Apps on Android are changing. A couple weeks ago, began testing its new Instant Apps that let users interact with aps without needing to download them in the ay Store, but ogressive b Apps takes that concept one step further. Not only do they eliminate the ay Store middleman altogether, they let developers build powerful apps right in Chrome deliver them quickly without the hassle of downloads updates, or concern about compatibility. Native apps have served us well ( likely will for years to comes), but is already thinking beyond the present implementation of apps to a future where everything is instant connected.
