google play store download for chromebook

With a singular delivery mechanism, developers can focus all their efforts on one app for everyone instead of multiple version for multiple operating systems. I’m not here to posture that PWAs can replace all native apps, but I am bullish on the idea that they can replace many of them. Can I see my feed, share content and get notifications? As long as the answer is yes, then I’m perfectly fine with using the app that does this in the best way possible on the device I’m using. Instead of marking the phone app (Android APK) as incompatible with Chrome OS, they are simply offering up the much better PWA instead.Īs end users, most of us won’t really notice as long as the app works in all the ways we expect. The PWA is far better on a Chromebook than the native Android app, it is great in desktop or tablet mode, and it is the best way to enjoy Twitter on a Chromebook. I, for one, much prefer the method being used by Twitter. Most times, if Google wants Chromebook users to default to the web version of a service, they simple make the app incompatible with Chromebooks and leave users to figure it all out on their own. We’ve looked around a bit for more examples of this, but have yet to find one just yet. As a matter of fact, the PWA is so good that I actually replaced the Android app on my phone with the PWA a few months ago and haven’t looked back. The Twitter website/PWA has become one of the best examples of a web-based application available today, so it isn’t odd to see Twitter make this move. For Twitter, that is actually not bad news. Not only is this done by default, from what we can tell, there is no option to even download and use the Android APK on a Chromebook at this point. The Play Store simply delivers the PWA when you click install. There’s no alert or option to choose which app you’d prefer.

Sure, there has always been the option to go to and install the PWA from there, but this is the first time we’re seeing a native Android app being replaced with the PWA right from the Play Store install. Alerted by a reader, we were made aware that the Twitter app in the Google Play Store defaults to an install of the Twitter PWA when you download the app on your Chromebook.

Google play store download for chromebook