After the debut of YouTube TV and Music as a Progressive Web App (PWA), Google is finally rolling out the PWA version of the main Youtube website for quick access.
Progressive Web Apps are an evolved version of a webpage that uses modern web capabilities to deliver an app-like user experience.
While using Youtube on Chrome, users getting a prompt with a plus icon in the Omnibox to install the app. If selected “Install,” a PWA version of YouTube will be installed on your computer with a large red play logo as its icon.
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One of the easiest difference to spot between the traditional website and the PWA version of Youtube is that the search bar is gone along with some Chrome UI elements. Users also get an option for shelf pinning, which gives you direct access to the video playing at that moment.Â
One more thing to note is that Google has started enforcing a new policy that would require developers to provide offline functionality in their PWA’s to make this PWA install prompt appear at the top of the Chrome browser.
Since rules are rules, then Google also needs to abide by them. Considering this, there are some slight chances that Google may be planning to add some offline functionality to the Youtube PWA, maybe an option to download videos for offline viewing.