Ever heard of Desktop PWA Sub Apps? They are Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) that you come with additional app icons for ‘sub apps’. Google Chrome will soon support these PWA sub-apps.

Desktop PWA Sub Apps

I didn’t know that these existed until I saw an experimental Chrome flag that was added today:

Desktop PWA Sub Apps: Enable installed PWAs to create shortcuts by installing their sub apps. Prototype implementation of: https://github.com/ivansandrk/multi-apps/blob/main/explainer.md

The github page mentioned in the flag description gives a very elaborate explanation of what this feature is. My favorite is this example usecase.

“Office productivity suites offer a wide range of different functionality including an email client, word processor, spreadsheet editor and more. Users of office suites typically use more than one major feature and it would be inconvenient to make the user install each as a separate PWA. With a multi-icon PWA, the user can install once and then access launch icons for distinct functionality.”

In other words, if Google has PWA apps for Google Sheets, Google Docs, and Google Slides, you could install a single Google Apps PWA and get all three.

If your app has a major feature that you want to highlight, you can create a sub for that specific feature. This will make it easy for users to launch those features.

If you are a developer with interest in PWAs, you should defnitely take a look at this project here.

For rest of us, we will have to wait till Google or other developers to release PWAs with sub apps.

Sounds like an interesting feature for the web? Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.

Source: Chromium Gerrit.