Will Apple approve PWAs in Mac Store?

[MarcellusMusic]

Question in detail
I am aware that Apple has updated their policies with regards to submitting web apps to Apple's app store. I am also aware that because of that, iOS packages are no longer available on the PWABuilder. However, I did notice that the PWABuilder still has an option to download a package for MacOS. I need to know if it is still possible to publish the desktop package to Apple's App store? Has anyone here recently submitted their MacOS PWABuilder package to the store and received approval?

[ghost]

Hello MarcellusMusic, thank you for your interest in PWABuilder!

I have automatically added a "needs triage" label to help get things started. Our team will look into the question and answer ASAP. Other community members may also answer the question and provide feedback 🙌

[JudahGabriel]

Hey Marcellus.

Yes, we haven't received signals against the MacOS App Store.

This month we'll be doing 2 things to help clarify:

1. We're talking to Apple about PWAs in the iOS App Store. We'll raise also the issue of PWAs in the Mac Store.
2. We're going to take an existing PWA and get it published into the Mac Store and see if we encounter any resistance.

[MarcellusMusic]

Hi @JudahGabriel

Thank you for your reply. I would love to publish my PWA to the MacOS Store this month. After starting the registration process with Apple for a developer account, they asked for a fee, so I wanted to check with you guys first to see if they would even approve it. When will you know?

[JudahGabriel]

Yes, Apple charges $99/year to publish in their app stores. (More precisely, they charge for their developer program, which enables app store publishing.)

No guarantees about all this. Apple may not give us a straight answer. We may hit slowdowns in publishing a PWA to the Mac Store. I'd recommend just going forward with your app. To my best knowledge, Apple won't reject your Mac app. If you do proceed, please post your results here.

[MarcellusMusic]

Okay @JudahGabriel, I am proceeding with publishing to the app store.

There's one more thing I wanted to ask you. When I was working on my Windows Store PWA, I would check for the window.windows object while tailoring my app. Since I'm going to be tailoring the PWA for Mac OS, is there a similar method I can use to detect the standalone app using either PHP or Javascript?

[ThaDaVos]

Hey all,

Sorry for commenting on this issue but it looks like some information I need is available here 😂

@MarcellusMusic - you mentioned something about PWA's directly in the App Store, right?
Any idea how?

I already got a PWA turned into an iOS package (back when the option was still available) and today I wanted to do it again to check if there are any updates to the generated package, as I'm having issues with high load times etc but I noticed the option is gone... then I found your issue and you mentioned changes about Apple's policies - any idea where I can find more information?

[ThaDaVos]

Found my answer here: pwa-builder/PWABuilder-CLI#354 (comment)
And here: #799

[davrous]

Okay @JudahGabriel, I am proceeding with publishing to the app store.

There's one more thing I wanted to ask you. When I was working on my Windows Store PWA, I would check for the window.windows object while tailoring my app. Since I'm going to be tailoring the PWA for Mac OS, is there a similar method I can use to detect the standalone app using either PHP or Javascript?

I think we're using the default user agent string of the Apple WebView in our code, so I don't think you can easily guess your PWA is currently running as a Mac Store App. Why would you need to know this?

Adding @Rumsha7 who has built our platform. A possible solution would be to modify the customUserAgent property to add a specific filed like PWABuilderMacOS for instance to help you identifying the execution context.

[JudahGabriel]

to detect the standalone app using either PHP or Javascript

Can you clarify here? Are you trying to detect whether you're an installed app? Or whether you're on MacOS?

[MarcellusMusic]

Hi All,

What I'm looking for is a simple way to detect if the user has launched the standalone PWA Builder App on macOS, so that I can run specific code and update the UI accordingly. This would allow me to tailor my app so that it does not feel like a duplicate of the other versions, but like a "real" macOS app.

[MarcellusMusic]

Why would you need to know this?

So that I can easily run specific code and update the UI of my app accordingly.

[JudahGabriel]

Understood.

@Rumsha7 and @lee-leonardo is there a way to tell from JS whether you're running in the MacOS app? Specifically, @MarcellusMusic is asking,

When I was working on my Windows Store PWA, I would check for the window.windows object while tailoring my app. Since I'm going to be tailoring the PWA for Mac OS, is there a similar method I can use to detect the standalone app using Javascript?

[Rumsha7]

Thanks for the question! Yes, one way to tell whether a PWA is running on MacOS is through the following JS code:
if (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Mac")!=-1) OSName="MacOS";
Reference: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/how-to-detect-operating-system-on-the-client-machine-using-javascript/?ref=rp

Hope that helps!

[MarcellusMusic]

Hi @Rumsha7 - Thank you for your reply! Awesome, the referenced code does tell me that I am running on macOS, but is there a way to tell if I'm running on both macOS && the PWABuilder app that I generated? I need to be able to do this as my UI will differ for the standalone macOS app. One idea was to check for the WKWebview object. Can you please confirm whether or not you guys are using WKWebView?

Thank you!

[Rumsha7]

Thank you for the clarification, @MarcellusMusic. Sorry I misunderstood your question earlier! Checking for WKWebView sounds like a good idea. I can confirm that we are using WKWebView (https://github.com/pwa-builder/pwabuilder-MacOS/blob/master/lib/assets/MacOSpwa/ViewController.swift).
Does that answer your question?

[MarcellusMusic]

Hi @Rumsha7 - Yes, that does answer my question! I really appreciate the confirmation.

@JudahGabriel, now that I have more clarity, I'll continue with submitting my app to the app store. I'll post the results here soon!

Thank you!

[Rumsha7]

Great! Thanks, @MarcellusMusic!

[MarcellusMusic]

Hi @Rumsha7, I wanted to quickly jump back in this thread because I'm encountering an error while running my app in Xcode:

Could you please shed light on what is happening?

Thank you!

[Rumsha7]

Thanks for the question, @MarcellusMusic! Adding @lee-leonardo.

[lee-leonardo]

@MarcellusMusic
I have a fix that will add an error log and comment for the user so that they'll be be able to fix the issue.
Essentially what is happening is you are using an unsafe reference to a file that doesn't exist. The forced unwrap operator ! ignores the compiler directive to force the developer to safely check pointers (references, but same thing under the hood). Hence the run time error.

So there's a few ways to fix this issue, but essentially you will need to reintroduce the manifest.json file back into the application.

Also make sure that this line is the same folder path from the root of the project folder to the manifest file:
https://github.com/pwa-builder/pwabuilder-MacOS/blob/pwabuilder_issue916/lib/assets/MacOSpwa/ViewController.swift#L96

[MarcellusMusic]

Understood.

I have reintroduced manifest.json back into the application and all is working for now.

@JudahGabriel,
Moving forward with publishing to the app store and I will post the results soon! Thank you!