Pinterest review: A popular PWA comes to the Microsoft Store

Pinterest is a popular site for sharing everything from abode design ideas to conditioning plans. It's a tremendously versatile tool for people looking to share ideas, bookmark favorite posts, and organize boards of content. Pinterest switched its website over to a PWA last year, only it's now bachelor direct through the Microsoft Shop.

Because Pinterest has been available to Windows 10 users for a long time every bit a PWA, the bigger questions are how does this compare to just using the Pinterest PWA in a browser, and how does this affect the trend of PWAs on Windows?

Pinterest is a free site to use, and equally such, the app is free besides.

Share, organize, and meliorate

A digital pinboard stored on the web

Pinterest allows you to share ideas, create boards, and organize pins to keep all of your ideas easy to sort through. The Microsoft Store version is a good example of PWAs helping the Microsoft Store.

Filling upwards the board

Pinterest'due south PWA in the Microsoft Store delivers the full Pinterest experience. You can pivot items to boards, browse categories, search content, bulletin people, and exercise everything else you lot can do on Pinterest's platform. Earlier Pinterest switched to a PWA, the site would scale poorly and cut content off. Now, it scales well and fills your screen attractively regardless of your device'south screen size. In my testing, everything felt as smooth as silk. Content loaded chop-chop, liking, pinning, and other core features worked well, and the entire experience was great. It's great to encounter a first-party app that runs so well on Windows ten from such a large visitor.

Pinterest besides supports web notifications and so you lot can stay up to date easily. Overall, Pinterest has dramatically improved compared to its sometime spider web version, and that translates to its presence in the Microsoft Shop. Medium did an all-encompassing breakup of Pinterest's conversion to a PWA. In it, they point out that the size of Pinterest's app on iOS was 56MB and on Android, it was 9.half dozen MB. In contrast, the PWA is a mere 150KB. That's but 1 of many improvements that helped the web experience for Pinterest, and those all come through hither as well.

Better than a browser?

The main question to me, and I imagine many users, about using Pinterest through the Microsoft Store is if it's any meliorate than using Pinterest in a browser. After all, the point of a PWA is to be platform agnostic and to scale well regardless of your device. If you can open Pinterest through the spider web or "install" it as an app through your browser, what's the point of downloading information technology through the Microsoft Shop? That's a off-white question for whatsoever PWA to some extent only is especially valid in the case of Pinterest.

Microsoft wants developers to put PWAs in the Microsoft Store for a few reasons. First, Microsoft wants developers to make app experiences that piece of work on Windows 10 instead of leaving Windows behind like most developers accept done with native applications. Second, they want pop services and apps to exist easily discoverable and installable through the Microsoft Store. This makes information technology easy for users to go to one place to get all of their apps, whether they be native UWP or PWA and gets users accustomed to using the Microsoft Store. Finally, Microsoft wants developers to take PWAs and expand them on Windows x by integrating with Windows 10 features such as Live Tiles and notifications.

Pinterest does well on two out of these iii metrics. The Pinterest PWA is very like to the Pinterest experience on other platforms. Boards scale well on unlike screen sizes, the cadre features are all in that location, and you can do everything you lot want to on Pinterest through the PWA. This is better than the previous version of Pinterest'south website that would chop boards in half and calibration poorly. Just again, these improvements be whether you use Pinterest through the Microsoft Store or your browser.

When it comes to discoverability and ease of installation, I see some benefits, merely they're pretty small-scale. I don't recall it's much harder to click install through a web browser than the Microsoft Shop. In fact, I clicked a link to Pinterest in the leaked version of Edge that's powered by Chromium, and it installed the PWA automatically. Its arrival on the Microsoft Shop does help the catalog in that location look a lot ameliorate. Microsoft can claim another pop service in its shop, and the app isn't going to be abased because it will be updated as the PWA improves on all platforms.

The expanse that Pinterest doesn't do well is integrating the PWA with Windows 10-specific features. Equally far as I can tell, Pinterest hasn't washed much in this regard. The Start Menu tile looks a bit better than when pinning the browser version of Pinterest to Start, but it doesn't appear to exist a Live Tile. Notifications don't seem to be unlike when Pinterest is installed through the Microsoft Shop either. If you put the browser version and the Microsoft Shop version of Pinterest on anyone'southward PC I dubiousness they'd be able to tell the divergence between the two. That'due south the point of PWAs in a way, merely it's still disappointing that Pinterest hasn't embraced integrating their PWA with Windows the way Twitter has. That being said, Pinterest is a newcomer to the Microsoft Store and features could be added in the future.

An impressive addition to the Microsoft Store

It's smashing for Windows x users and users on other platforms that Pinterest converted their website to a PWA. It provides a better Pinterest feel on a diversity of devices, including Windows ten machines. Information technology'south besides good that Pinterest brought the PWA to the Microsoft Store because it gives users another style to install the application and helps close the app gap. That being said, Pinterest through the Microsoft Store is virtually identical to installing the PWA through a browser. Ideally, Pinterest would integrate Windows ten specific features into their app.

The lesser line is that this is an excellent Pinterest feel. While you could get the aforementioned experience through your browser, it'southward e'er proficient to take more options. I hope to meet more than companies cough Google cough jump on the PWA bandwagon similar Pinterest has.

Pros

Easy to install
Free
Scales well on different screen sizes
Provides a total Pinterest experience on Windows 10

Cons

Get-go Card tile isn't a Alive Tile
Doesn't integrate with Windows 10 when compared to the competition
Substantially identical to installing through a browser

Share, organize, and improve

A digital pinboard stored on the web

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