gnome-software/subprojects/gnome-pwa-list

GNOME PWA list

This repository is a place to maintain a list of Progressive Web Apps that are suitable for inclusion with GNOME Software. The goals of this initiative are:

1. To facilitate the discovery of useful apps by pre-populating a list of web apps in GNOME Software
2. To enable users to take advantage of the powerful features of PWAs, such as offline functionality and desktop integration
3. To make the GNOME platform competitive with other platforms which already make PWAs first-class citizens

There is more context available in the discussion on this issue.

Criteria for inclusion

To be eligible for inclusion, PWAs must:

• either be released under an open source license (see below) or appear in the popular apps category here or here
• be served over HTTPS
• include a web app manifest with an icon, name, and a display value of fullscreen, standalone, or minimal-ui. The app having an Install button in Chrome means the app meets and exceeds these criteria.
• be fully functional in GNOME Web
• not duplicate a native (non-Electron) app available for GNOME

Process for adding to the list

1. Determine that the app meets all the criteria above.
2. Gather the information for each of the columns listed below.
3. If the license is FSF-approved or OSI-approved, the app will go in gnome-pwa-list-foss.csv, otherwise gnome-pwa-list-proprietary.csv.
4. Add a new line in the format "URL,license,categories,content-rating,adaptive,custom-summary" to either CSV file as appropriate.
5. Re-build the AppStream xml; see below.
6. Open a merge request here.

Column	Example value	Accepted values
URL	https://app.diagrams.net/	the starting URL of the app
license	Apache-2.0	the license(s) of the client side software in a format conforming to the AppStream spec
categories	Graphics;Office	one or more main or additional categories as defined here
content-rating	social-info=intense;social-audio=moderate	a set of key-value pairs which are OARS 1.1 attributes and values; see here. "social-info=none" is appropriate if the service does not even store IP addresses
adaptive	adaptive	either "adaptive" or "not-adaptive" depending on whether mobile devices are supported
custom-summary	"Telegram web app based on the open API"	a one-sentence summary to use instead of the one in the manifest, or an empty string

Re-generating AppStream xml

The script pwa-metainfo-generator.py can take the CSV files mentioned above and generate AppStream metainfo for them, which enables software centers to display them with rich metadata such as screenshots.

1. Install the requests and bs4 python3 modules using pip3 or your package manager
2. To regenerate the FOSS xml: python3 pwa-metainfo-generator.py gnome-pwa-list-foss.xml
3. To regenerate the proprietary xml: python3 pwa-metainfo-generator.py gnome-pwa-list-proprietary.xml
4. You can check the validity using e.g. appstreamcli validate gnome-pwa-list-foss.xml. It will complain about missing descriptions but GNOME Software handles those gracefully.