Google and Microsoft teaming up to bring more apps to the Play Store

In a report by Thurrot Microsoft and Google are working together to bring more apps to the Play Store. These applications will be built using Microsoft’s Progressive Web App builder and will use Google’s Bubblewrap utility and library to make the most out of the new features.

This collaboration will bring more and better progressive web applications (PWA) to the Play Store.

Progressive web apps

PWAs are a type of application software that are delivered through the web. These apps are commonly built using HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and JavaScript. They work on any platform that uses standards-compliment browser. The functionality of these applications includes working offline, push notifications, users experiencing something similar to a native app on desktop and on mobile devices.

Since these applications are a type of webpage or website, developers and users don’t have to install PWAs via the Play Store or App Store.

What will come from this collaboration bring?

The partnership has been going on for months, and there has been progress in the integration of the two tools (PWABuilder and Bubblewrap). Microsoft’s Judah Himango says that PWABuilder uses Bubblewrap ‘under the hood” to allow developers to package PWAs for the Play Store. In turn PWABuilder now supports the full range of trusted web activity options that help PWAs work better on Android.

Developers can now customise the appearance of the android status bar, and the navigation bar. PWAs using PWABuilder can also customise the splash screen, change the launcher name, use existing signing key, utilise “deeper” push notification support, configure package ID and version and more.

Microsoft is also collaborating with Google on Project Fugu in an effort to incubate and standardise web platform features.

Conclusion

We won’t be seeing the results of this partnership in the immediate future. The upside is that it could lead to better apps reaching Android devices. The partnership works well for both parties. Google gets more developers to work on better web apps for Android and Microsoft gets more creators to use PWABuilder.