With Chrome 57, Progressive Web Apps will appear in Android's app drawer, settings, more
The ambitious goal behind Progressive Web Apps is to allow websites to have the same capabilities and features as a native app, but without the initial download. Google has been a heavy backer …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the moment Progressive Web Apps stop being a browser feature and start being an OS citizen: with Chrome 57, sites a user has added land in Android's app drawer and settings alongside native installs — no Play Store download required. It lands a year after Henrik Joreteg documented why he left iOS for Android because WebKit's limits kept web apps from feeling native there, making this rollout Google's clearest answer to that gap.
First-order effects
- Developers with installable web apps suddenly get default home-screen, app-drawer, and settings presence on Android without shipping through the Play Store, collapsing the install friction that favored native apps.
- Users gain one unified place to manage web and native apps, which makes 'add to home screen' a real alternative to downloading for lightweight use cases.
Second-order effects
- Apple's WebKit constraints become a visible competitive liability on the exact axis — web apps indistinguishable from native — where Android now demonstrates parity, pressuring the case for loosening them.
- The Play Store's role as the sole gateway to Android app presence starts to erode for web-first developers, shifting discovery toward the open web and search rather than the store catalog.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the browser becomes the app platform layer: Google extended the same treatment to desktop with Chrome OS 67's PWA support, and by 2020 even Microsoft was collaborating with Google to bring PWAs into the Play Store — evidence that OS vendors converge on the web as a first-class packaging format rather than fighting it.
The trend: Operating systems are absorbing web apps as first-class citizens, turning browser vendors into de facto app-platform providers and weakening the native-store gatekeeping model.