The new ‘Add to Chromebook’ badge supercharges PWA installs

In the session from Google I/O 2024 called What’s new in ChromeOS, the team outlined a few features that are on the way and one in particular that is going to fundamentally change the way you deal with web app/PWA installs. And I love this!

First, let’s talk about what this new badge is. The ‘Add to Chromebook’ badge will function in a few ways, but will basically be an app discovery tool for developers and those that maintain a website to easily surface their Android or Web application to potential users. Here’s what it looks like:

From the presentation, we learned that there are more than 100 million monthly web app users and over 300 million active, large-screen Android devices out there. That number of course includes Chromebooks. So with those sorts of numbers, a cleaner, easier way to show users that an app or site can be installed on their Chromebook is pretty vital.

This badge has some cool tricks coming with it

Obviously, if your badge is tied to an Android app, it will trigger the Play Store and you’ll get your app from there. But there are PWAs served in the Play Store, too, so for apps like TikTok, the badge can still point to the Play Store for the download. But if your app is your site (think about something like Gmail), this badge can make it far clearer to users that your “website” is actually a web application that can be installed.

And this is where things get super interesting. With this badge is coming a new ability by ChromeOS to install Web apps and PWAs from anywhere – not just while on the app’s URL. This means you could click on the new badge for something like Pixlr (a fantastic image editing PWA) from an email or on a 3rd-party site and you’ll get the new wizard that looks like a full-blown installer you’d expect when “installing” an application.

Combined with the upcoming App Mall we expect at any point now and you have a new wave of app discovery for Chromebook users just on the horizon. The web is far more powerful and useful now than it has ever been, and moves like this from the ChromeOS team will only help more people realize all the functionality and possibility that exists outside of the normal app delivery systems. Look for it to land in ChromeOS 125 very soon!