One of the web’s superpowers is its low friction: a new site is always only a single tap away, allowing users to easily navigate through a rich diversity of experiences. The mobile web provides a great discovery experience for users and unparalleled reach for developers.

Unfortunately, once users discover an experience they love, it is hard for them to build a meaningful relationship since websites lack the engaging capabilities developers have come to expect from mobile such as push notifications and home screen icons. As a result, developers have needed to decide between the engagement potential of a native app and the reach potential of a mobile website.

Chrome 42 addresses this dilemma by allowing users to engage more deeply with the mobile web experiences that are important to them, by both opting in to receive push notifications directly from websites and easily adding regularly-visited high-quality sites to their home screen.

Push Notifications

Timely, personalized notifications save users the effort of manually checking for updates throughout the day and have enabled a host of new experiences from real time communication to live updates on breaking news.

This release of Chrome supports the new emerging web standard for push notifications on Android and desktop, enabling users to opt in to allow a specific website to send them push notifications just like an installed native app. Over the coming weeks, mobile web users will be able to opt in to receiving push notifications from early adopters including Beyond the Rack, eBay, Facebook, FanSided, Pinterest, Product Hunt, and VICE News. Roost and Mobify also provide services that make it easy for developers to integrate web-based push notifications into their site with minimal custom implementation work.

Promoting Add to Home Screen

Mobile users often open their phones to pass time while on the bus or waiting in line. Home screen icons help them easily jump back into their favorite experiences with just a single tap. In this release of Chrome for Android, users who frequently visit a modern, mobile-optimized website such as Flipboard or Medium will be offered the option to easily add the site directly to their home screen in one tap, allowing them to keep in touch and engaged throughout the day.

Developers can now take advantage of these and other recent changes including

improved performance

,

full offline support

, and access to device capabilities such as the

camera

and

geolocation

to deliver more meaningful experiences on the web than ever before. These new features will continue to improve and evolve over time, diminishing the difficult choice for developers between the reach of the mobile web and the engagement of native apps.