[potch]

"Progressive Web Apps" is a Google brand. It's made of some good best practices and great technologies, but they reserve the right to re-define it and change the rewards around it however they choose. Install buttons are the carrot, and search rankings are the stick. Will non PWA-compliant but otherwise fast, well-made mobile web sites rank as highly as PWAs?

[kinlan]

Just a minor nit, yes we have been working under the Progressive Web Apps headline for a while (I work on the devrel team) but it is a shared term that Opera and Mozilla are using.

Search has no understanding of Progressive Web Apps to my knowledge. Performance, Mobileness (on mobile search) and TLS are all ranking factors of some sort.

[lucasmullens]

Google isn't trying to make every website a PWA. Why would they punish all non-PWAs?

[kinlan]

The current way that we see the banner is that it is the equivalent of an App install banner for web sites that meet the rough idea of what a Progressive Web App is and would be something that you would want to install or act like an installed app on the system.

The thought at the time of the change wrt to the fullscreen or standalone is that to get that app like treatment in the OS you would expect it to launch as an app would on the system (sans-url bar).

Note: we are also thinking of ways to get the URL bar back to the user when it is launched standalone or in fullscreen. It's a complex UX problem but we want to get the best of both worlds.