Predictable App Updating - Blink process required?

[Dibyajyoti Pal]

Hi Blink API owners,

This is Dibya from the PWA team. We recently completed the implementation of Predictable App Updating, where we made PWA updates more predictable (see PRD, explainer and Chromestatus). We have a launch underway to 1% Stable via Finch for experimentation purposes, but we're not sure if we need to go through the Blink intent process.

As per https://www.chromium.org/blink/launching-features/#dev-trials, it seems we are not modifying the behavior of app updating that much, except for a relatively small case for developers where updating the icon without updating the icon url in their PWA's manifest will no longer be triggering a manifest update for their PWA's identity (see spec changes to be made here). We have also not changed the manifest parsing logic on the blink side to implement this, and the changes we have made so far are all in Chromium.

With this information in mind, do we need to go through the blink launch process, considering that the web developer behavior isn't going to be changing that much?

Thanks!

Regards,

Dibya

[Dibyajyoti Pal]

Hi Blink API owners,

Following up on this conversation, can folks share some more information on whether the blink process will be required for this?

Thanks!

Regards,

Dibya

[Mike Taylor]

Hi Dibya,

An imperfect rule of thumb is "will developers have to do something about this change" (i.e., write or delete some code).

Given that you write "we are not modifying the behavior of app updating that much", I suspect the answer is yes. But, not being an expert, just looking at https://www.w3.org/TR/appmanifest/#updating there isn't enough info for me to understand what changed or didn't. An I2S is a great place to explain that. 

thanks,
Mike

On 12/12/25 12:33 p.m., 'Dibyajyoti Pal' via blink-api-owners-discuss wrote:

Hi Blink API owners,

Following up on this conversation, can folks share some more information on whether the blink process will be required for this?

Thanks!

Regards,

Dibya

On Tue, Dec 9, 2025 at 9:25 AM Dibyajyoti Pal <diby...@google.com> wrote:

Hi Blink API owners,

This is Dibya from the PWA team. We recently completed the implementation of Predictable App Updating, where we made PWA updates more predictable (see PRD, explainer and Chromestatus). We have a launch underway to 1% Stable via Finch for experimentation purposes, but we're not sure if we need to go through the Blink intent process.

As per https://www.chromium.org/blink/launching-features/#dev-trials, it seems we are not modifying the behavior of app updating that much, except for a relatively small case for developers where updating the icon without updating the icon url in their PWA's manifest will no longer be triggering a manifest update for their PWA's identity (see spec changes to be made here). We have also not changed the manifest parsing logic on the blink side to implement this, and the changes we have made so far are all in Chromium.

With this information in mind, do we need to go through the blink launch process, considering that the web developer behavior isn't going to be changing that much?

Thanks!

Regards,

Dibya

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "blink-api-owners-discuss" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to blink-api-owners-d...@chromium.org.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-api-owners-discuss/CA%2BnHHJTJaXmHM81qU2RE11vZbVgDf%2BbTVnJRyFM-hOJ7eDADng%40mail.gmail.com.

[Dibyajyoti Pal]

Hi Mike,

Thank you for your response! I have sent out the I2S from Chromestatus.

Regards,

Dibya