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Not long ago, a new trend began with Chromebooks and Android apps: the ability to install PWAs directly from the Play Store in place of the Android app equivalent on your Chromebook. We’ve talked about the importance and worth of this change before, so I won’t bother rehashing that again. All you really need to know is this change is slowly but surely becoming a more regular occurrence and we love it. Twitter and YouTube TV are already handled in this way, choosing to install the PWA when users choose these apps from the Play Store, and now there’s another official app to add to the list: Google News.
Just like the previous two apps in this category, when you go to install Google News from the Play Store, you’ll go through the entire, standard install process and your Chromebook will install the PWA of Google News versus the Android app. The same thing will occur if you head to news.google.com and click install from the URL bar as well and, additionally, the uninstall process can happen from all the places you’d expect: even right from the Play Store.
Over time, I could see most of Google’s own apps taking this approach on Chromebooks. Aside from the Gmail app on the Lenovo Chromebook Duet, there are rarely times I choose the Android app over the web-based version of anything these days. With lower overhead, seamless updates, and much faster performance across the board, PWAs are almost always the best option for Chromebooks and I’m very excited to see Google News added to the fray. We’re still on the lookout for another non-Google property to jump in on this movement to join alongside Twitter, but it feels like it is just a matter of time now. We’ve been saying it for a long time, but PWAs are here to stay and the Play Store could become the absolute best place to find them in the near future.
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