Published by Steve Litchfield at 6:13 UTC, March 5th 2018

Now here's a little utility that works brilliantly - with a limited use case at the moment. I've covered PWA (Progressive Web Applications) before here on AAWP - they run pretty well in Edge under Windows 10 Mobile, but you have to live with the URL bar from the browser always visible. Ditto HTML5 sites, and so on - in any of these cases you always end up seeing the browser furniture, rather than enjoying the web application experience. PAWA aims to get rid of the URL bar, but there's a pretty big caveat.

The caveat is.... that this only work for one PWA or HTML5 app/site. There's no facility - yet - to have multiple tiles/instances launching multiple apps/sites. But if there's one particular PWA that you find yourself using quite often (e.g. Google Maps Go) via a standard Edge shortcut tile then creating the tile via PAWA will certainly let you enjoy the PWA full-screen with no URL bar in sight.

My suspicion is that there's no technical reason why multiple sites/pages/PWAs with multiple shortcut tiles couldn't be supported - it just needs the developer to do some more coding. So watch this space for an update!

In the meantime, here's PAWA in action:

In short, you give the tile a title, paste (or type) in the exact URL you want to go to (in this case the Google Maps Go PWA) and pick an image to use for the tile. Then tap 'Create Tile' and you're done. Note the absence of any way in the UI to create another tile.

So, bottom left is the new tile and tapping it takes you - on the first run - to the PAWA interface. You then tap back and try again and this time (and from then on) you get the PWA/HTML5/etc. in an Edge instance in application form, with no URL bar. Result!

Back to the caveat though. In the screenshot, above left, you'll notice a second PAWA tile, I tried again with the AAWP HTML5/responsive site. However, although this works fine, I also then get to AAWP when I tap on the Google Maps tile! So PAWA really is limited to just the one app/site.

Surely this can be coded in a way that different tiles go to their own PAWA URLs? Perhaps through some kind of under-the-hood settings file? If this really is a technical limitation then what about the PAWA tile being a montage of the shortcuts set up so far and with a mini-menu of available PWAs when the app launches? I'm sure the developer can think up an elegant way to handle all this.

You can grab PAWA in the Store here - which PWA or HTML5 site will you choose as your one full screen experience?