Chrome is working to let you easily reinstall all of your web apps on a new device upon setup

Ever found yourself switching to a new phone and missing all those web apps you had installed since they were more convenient or readily available than apps? Google apparently knows the struggle and seems to be cooking up a solution that could make transitioning your web applications or ‘PWA’s to a new device a breeze.

Web apps now pack as much a punch as many traditionally installed Windows software, and the web is the future. And while they sit pretty on your home screen, just like the apps downloaded from the Play Store, there’s been a hiccup—moving them to a new device has been a manual chore. Any apps that are not installed via the Play Store itself usually sync with Chrome, but the icon doesn’t come with it, and it’s not always reliable.

In the latest Chrome Canary release (version 121), there’s a new developer flag: chrome://flags/#pwa-restore-ui. When this feature is fully baked and ready to roll out, it promises to let you restore your beloved web apps with ease when you move to a new device. Basically, Chrome will remember your web app usage based via your browser history over the current month and suggest a restore point.

Anyway, we don’t have much more information than that at this time, but let me know what you think in the comments below. If everything goes according to plan and Google does, in fact, release this in a future version of Chrome officially, do you think it would be useful to you? Do you use a lot of web apps I like I do, or are you partial to Android apps on your Chromebook and phone?

Other than the Reedsy editor for writing, I know of no PWAs that actually install to your phone’s app drawer, but I wish more websites would do this. My hope is that google starts enforcing this for web apps, as I’m sick of having all of them littering my home screen pages.