Chrome on Android will soon let you pin websites to your app drawer

Google Chrome is improving the way Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are added to the Home screen.

Progressive Web Apps are users’ experiences that combine the best of web and apps. These apps are instantly accessible on the home screen without the need of installation. These apps load instantly even in poor network conditions. They respond quickly to users interactions with smooth animations. It feels like having app-styled interaction and navigation. Served via HTTPS, they provide a secure, engaging and faster experience.

This feature “Add to Home screen” was first introduced in 2015 in Chrome for Android version 42 which helped users easily add and access their favorite websites on their home screens.

With the new version of this experience which will be introduced in the coming days in Chrome Beta, Chrome will integrate it into Android in a much deeper way than before. This will also be helpful for website developers to attract more audience. The blog reads,

“Progressive Web Apps will now appear in the app drawer section of the launcher and in Android Settings, and will be able to receive incoming intents from other apps. Long presses on their notifications will also reveal the normal Android notification management controls rather than the notification management controls for Chrome.

This new Add to Home screen feature is one more step in our journey to empower developers to build the best possible experience for their users, and we are committed to ensuring the same mechanisms for installing Progressive Web Apps are available to all browsers on Android.”

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Instead of being just Android Shortcut icons, web apps will now be more deeply integrated with Android by allowing them to appear in the app drawer section of the launcher for better notification management.

Google Chrome is the most used browser as the recent statistics show. It stopped working for Windows XP, Windows Vista or any Mac device running OS X 10.8 or older last year. Google has recently announced that Gmail will stop working on Chrome Browser version 53 and lower by the end of this year.

This feature is already available in Chrome Canary, latest Chrome designed for developers, and will be rolling out to Chrome 57 beta over the next few weeks.