Chrome 72 for Android shipped the long-awaited Trusted Web Activity (TWA) feature, which means we can now distribute PWAs in the Google Play Store!
Is TWA a Hybrid framework, similar to Cordova?
No. With Cordova or other hybrid solutions, you are typically shipping your web resources (HTML, JS, CSS, etc.) within your APK package. Also, the engine is different and isolated from the users’ browser, so no session or cache sharing.
With Trusted Web Activity you don’t need to package any resource file from your PWA (only native components, in case you want them); all your resources will be downloaded and updated on the fly from your Service Worker. Your PWA will still be rendered with the installed Chrome version, sharing all storage, cache, and sessions with the browser. Therefore, if your user has a session on your website opened when the user installs the app from the Play Store, she will still be logged in. The user is just installing a shortcut to Chrome using a special mode.
How to develop apps with TWA
Is TWA a Hybrid framework, similar to Cordova?
No. With Cordova or other hybrid solutions, you are typically shipping your web resources (HTML, JS, CSS, etc.) within your APK package. Also, the engine is different and isolated from the users’ browser, so no session or cache sharing.
With Trusted Web Activity you don’t need to package any resource file from your PWA (only native components, in case you want them); all your resources will be downloaded and updated on the fly from your Service Worker. Your PWA will still be rendered with the installed Chrome version, sharing all storage, cache, and sessions with the browser. Therefore, if your user has a session on your website opened when the user installs the app from the Play Store, she will still be logged in. The user is just installing a shortcut to Chrome using a special mode.
How to develop apps with TWA
- Use a high-level Java Support Library provided by the Chrome team: in this case, you don’t need to write any Java or Kotlin code; you create an Android Studio project (or clone the example), set up some metadata in AndroidManifest.xml from your Web App Manifest and you are done.
- Connect to the Trusted Web Activity manually. If you have experience developing Android apps with Java or Kotlin, you can just plug your PWA manually into your app.
Calling native code
There is already a bi-directional channel to communicate the TWA Server (Chrome) and the TWA Client (our APK). That channel is currently being used to send Push Messages and show them as being part of our native app and not Chrome, but nothing else yet.
There is a potential here to bridge native code and JavaScript code without too much effort and let our PWAs access native code, similar to what happens when we publish an APPX with a PWA for Microsoft Store.
Maximiliano Firtman @ Medium.com
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