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Microsoft has had very little luck growing its own app store, at least outside of the Xbox game store. The first iteration for Windows 8 was a complete disaster and while things have improved over the years, it still pales in comparison to other app stores, even with its compatibility layer to support win32 software. His latest attempt seems to focus on the latest generation of web apps known as Progressive Web Apps, and he’s trying to convince PWA developers to put their apps on the Microsoft Store instead of elsewhere.
Unlike normal web applications, PWAs are designed to better integrate into the underlying operating system and behave almost like a native application. Of course, there are limits considering that web API standards do not yet have full access to the functionality that native applications have, but PWAs lack functionality that makes up for universality across platforms and stores.
Microsoft already supported PWA in the original days of edgeHTML, but now that it has moved to Chromium Edge it is making an even stronger effort to get PWA in the store. Describes the general benefits of PWAs, including their availability on almost any platform, including Android and Chrome OS. Platforms that do not have a Microsoft Store.
Ironically, Microsoft’s attempts to sell the PWA idea can backfire. PWAs are so cross-platform that they don’t actually need any app stores to distribute, making the Microsoft Store practically irrelevant. Developers heading to the Microsoft Store will still have to go through a few extra steps to get in rather than just sticking with their own separate systems, like a browser.
Microsoft presents its PWABuilder as an advantage, giving application developers a single tool to develop Progressive Web Apps and package them for the Microsoft Store in one go. On the other hand, it is not the only tool available and is in fact based on Google’s own Devtools, which again makes a bad case for doing additional work just to access the Microsoft Store.
