"The native app install prompt gives you the ability to let users quickly and seamlessly install your native app on their device directly from the app store, without leaving the browser" https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/app-install-banners/native
Boo boo, hiss hiss. Combined with TWAs (https://blog.chromium.org/2019/02/introducing-trusted-web-activity-for.html) the messaging seems to be: bundle your website as an APK, submit it to the Play Store, redirect your web users to the native app. I thought PWAs were moving us away from all this nonsense?
Rob Dolin at Microsoft and Marcos Caceres at Mozilla (et al) did a ton of work to add things like IARC rating, screenshots, and category to the Web App Manifest spec. https://github.com/w3c/manifest
You already know who owns the site, because they own the domain. You have all the information you need to ingest their app into the app store – no need to make them build a native app wrapper, submit it to the store, redirect their users to the native app, and go through all that hoopla.
At this point, I would love for Pinafore to be listed as a "native" app in the Play Store (and Apple App Store, and MS Store), but out of sheer stubbornness I refuse to jump through all these hoops.
@ishara @nolan To avoid Electron you can open a website in the GNOME Web and then use “Save as Web Application...” from the menu. It's probably one of the most underadvertised features it has and pretty much unique in that world with any website.
(Also, sorry if I you already knew, IIRC not long ago I mentioned it in some other conversation — it's just that I love the feature 
)
@ishara Chrome supports PWA installs on Linux and Windows at least. There's also Mastodon as a Sidebar for Firefox which is pretty neat: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mastodon-as-a-sidebar/