Back in February, Microsoft confirmed its plans for bringing Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) to Windows 10. At the time, the company said it will start crawling the web for high-quality PWA apps and bring them to the Microsoft Store as standalone applications.

As promised, we started seeing some new PWAs on the Microsoft Store starting late last month when Twitter replaced its native UWP app with its new PWA app on the Microsoft Store. In addition to Twitter, Microsoft has started releasing some other PWAs on the Microsoft Store, as first spotted by Italian blog Aggiornamenti Lumia. The first set of PWAs on the Microsoft include popular UK-based online shopping service ASOS, Skyscanner, Men’s Wearhouse, SDN, and a couple of other apps shown in the screenshot above.

These new PWAs on the Microsoft Store are essentially the regular websites wrapped inside an application. Unlike the Twitter PWA, however, some of these apps don’t seem to be making use of the main PWA features such as push notifications. But that shouldn’t be too much of a problem as PWAs can be updated just like regular websites without needing to actually update the app on the Microsoft Store. After all, the whole point of bringing PWAs to the Microsoft Store is to expand its collection of apps, and not really about the native features — in other words, regular users will continue to interact with these apps just like a regular app without knowing what’s happening behind the scenes.

Tagged with Microsoft Store, PWAs, Redstone 4