bubblewrap VS pwa-to-apk-action

I think it's not correct to conflate the App Store and the Play Store like this. Apple is very hostile to PWAs in the App Store, whereas Google wrote a tool to easily package your PWA for the Play Store https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/bubblewrap

So for me, I publish to the Play Store to get some free users who find my app that way. App Store, not worth the headache of trying to skirt Apple's rules.

Ideally I think app stores should allow listing PWAs directly, rather than banning them (like Apple) or forcing them to use a wrapper (like Google). Whatever complaints people have about that (app can change without review, etc) also apply to the current situation in the Play Store. Once your wrapper PWA is accepted, you can change the website however you want. So what's the point of the wrapper?

After some research, I felt fairly confident going into the Google Play review process. Google Play makes PWA a first class member and they even offer bubblewrap to help you convert your PWA into an app you can submit. I also read that people had success with using PWABuilder for their apps (which uses bubblewrap internally). I figured my Capacitor app would have a decent chance to pass.

Of course, it doesn't use any native framework, it's a pure Progressive Web App (PWA) wrapped as Trusted Web Activity. The advantage with this is you do not need to bundle it every time there is an update, you just deploy it to the PlayStore once and then it stays up-to-date with the web app automatically. You also do not need to worry about users using old versions, aka. your backend needs to handle only the latest version. I used bubblewrap for the bundling, but there is also a GUI from Microsoft called PWA Builder.

The Django backend is not packaged, it just exposes an API to sync and process data, only the Nuxt frontend is packaged. It is more or less straight forward and works out of the box with the nuxt/pwa package for PWA and bubblewrap or PWA Builder for TWA.

If you don't like PWA Builder I'd look at Bubblewrap it's made by Google to make an Android app out of a PWA.

Another inexpensive way of getting an app is by creating a PWA and building an app by using tools like https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/bubblewrap

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are great and you can even publish them — with limitations — to most of the app stores out there via tools like bubblewrap or PWA Builder. See also Trusted Web Activities (TWAs) and my previous post Publishing a Progressive Web App (PWA) on the PlayStore — What works and what doesn’t (in 2021).

I directly used bubblewrap, but it's the same thing which PWABuilder.com use too.

This repository contains files generated by bubblewrap-cli which will be used in pwa-to-apk-action, it's a one time process, I'll automate this step further so that you only have to push to your web app and the project along with apk get's generated automatically, currently only apk generation is automated.