Waching daily Sep 28 2018

So, I've heard Microsoft is automatically adding

some Progressive Web Apps to the Microsoft Store.

What's up with that?

Yes, we are actually actively calling the web

looking for progressive web apps and we're using

the Bing crawler to identify those apps.

And the first step in doing that identification is to look

for the existence of a web app manifest.

Since we consider that a clear signal

that a site wants to be considered an app.

Now, anyone who wants to be excluded from that crawl

can go ahead and do so.

All you have to do is use your robots.txt file

to block Bing from being able to access your web app manifest

and you're all set.

But if you do want to be in the Microsoft Store

or if you're okay with being in the Microsoft Store

and want to have us go ahead and pull it in,

we will go through the process of doing that.

And that actually involves a few different steps.

We obviously make sure that it meets the baseline criteria

for being at PWA. So you need to be

running a secure site.

It needs to have a web app manifest;

which is that the first thing that we look for,

and then you need to have some sort of serviceable

serviceworker or something that's actually being done

by the serviceworker to improve performance.

Then we look at things like:

does this abide by Microsoft Store policies,

is there anything that we need to be concerned about,

we won't automatically ingest things

that are pay for or subscription-based.

Those would need to be submitted manually.

But if if your website goes ahead and meets all of these criteria,

we will use the information you provide in the web app manifest

to actually populate your store page

and provide that to our users when we make that public.

Now, if we go through the process

of automatically adding your PWA to the Microsoft Store

and down the road you're like, "You know what?

I actually want to control my entry in the Microsoft Store,"

you can absolutely take possession of that

and control it from there on out.