Publishing to the App Store

[00:00:00]
>> Maximiliano Firtman: The title or the subtitle of this course is you don't need the App Store. But you know, mostly if you are dealing with the businesses and your clients, sometimes they want the App Store. Well, you can go to the App Store if you want keeping all the advantages.

[00:00:20]
For that, you need to create the webapp-launcher package. It's a native package that renders a browser runtime in standalone mode that will load our PWA from the cloud. We won't ship, as with PhoneGap or Apache Cordova as a hybrid, the HML, we will still keep the same advantages.

[00:00:39]
The difference is that the icon, instead of coming from the browser menu, it's coming from the store, okay? Of course, you need to follow all the rules from the store, right? So there are some tools available, you can use it manually. You can create this manually if you know Xcode and Swift, Android Studio and Kotlin, or .NET and C#.

[00:00:59]
You can create your own packages for different stores and operating systems. You can use some CLI tools, or you can use PWA builder. What's PWA builder? A website that will do that for you. PWA builder.com is open source. It's also available as a CLI and let's Cover it quickly, so I will open PWA builder.com, by the way, it's a Microsoft Project.

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And you can see here, you can ship your PWA to App Stores, Windows, the Microsoft Store, the App Store, Google Play Store, Android and Meta for the Meta Quest for Meta Horizon. Once the deal, you enter the URL of your PWA. So we can go and try to create the Scooch app packages, let's start.

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It will first check your PWA to see if it's correct, if you have all the things you need, it will give you suggestions.
>> Maximiliano Firtman: Let's wait for that. So, now it's giving me some suggestions on things that I might change, action item, but there are no big errors.

[00:02:20]
The manifest, I can add more features to the manifest, the service worker, I have a service worker, capabilities that I'm using and so on. It's a still running test. So, basically with that button package of stores, there we are. We are ready to package for a store. So I can click here and say okay, what do you want?

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The Windows package, the Android package, where PWAs are first-class applications, iOS package, Meta Quest package, and you say, 'Okay, let's make the Android package,' okay? What's the package ID and then you have a form with things that have to do with the Play Store, okay? Squoosh name, short name, do you wanna get the source code for Android Studio in case you wanna change that manually?

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Then you get not just the file, it's called the AAV, the Android build for the Play Store, you can get the source code in case. In case you wanna, if you know Kotlin, Android Studio, and you wanna change that. And when you're done, download a package, and it creates a zip file ready for the store.

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Of course, you need to pay for the store, get the publisher account, follow the rules, and download the package, that's all. And it works also for for Apple, for iOS, you need to, it's more experimental. The one for Apple, it just experimental, but it works. Need to check, then, of course, the rules, because technically you can, but you need to check if the content and the app, the service and the business that you have inside the app follows the App Store the rules.

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>> Learner: So the advantage of that is that you don't have to release new versions to update.
>> Maximiliano Firtman: Exactly because you will update the app in the store only if you change the metadata. If you change the content of your app, you shall deploy new app as with the browser installation.

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And there you have the some apps that are actually using it, Tiktok, Twitter, Facebook, they're using this to, probably to wrap some or to package.
>> Maximiliano Firtman: There are PWAs for the stores. Typically they have light versions. Tiktok lite, Twqitter lite are actually PWAs, okay? Remember that not every web app can be published in app stores, so you need to get into another whole business.

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In my website, third.Dev, I have a session that I did for a conference. It's free, it's available there. It's one hour thing only on how to publish PWAs to the app stores in case you wanna get more on that.