Re: [w3c/manifest] Add a unique identifier for a PWA (#586)

CC @fabricedesre @tantek @mounirlamouri

@philloooo wrote:
>Hi All, I created an [explainer](https://github.com/philloooo/pwa-unique-id/blob/main/explainer.md) doc in my personal repo. Please take a look and create issues if you think there are missing use cases/incorrect information or any suggestion for edits!  
We can still keep the ongoing conversations about which way is better here.

Thank you for sharing that analysis, @philloooo.


> When discussing behaviors on Android, this doc is exclusively only covering Chromium-based browsers on Android

...

> When discussing behaviors on desktop, this doc covers Chromium-based browsers and Firefox (desktop).

As I understand it Firefox desktop does not support installing PWAs, so this analysis actually only covers Chrome desktop and Chrome for Android.

Taken for what it is (an analysis of what works best for the Chrome team, given their particular set of requirements and technical debt), I think the conclusions are completely reasonable.

> Overall, if we use manifest_url as the global_id, we need to not support the use case of making manifest_url updatable or deal with non stable primary keys for managing apps across devices... If there weren't existing apps & infrastructure that relied on changing manifest_url, and this was being designed from the beginning, this option is a lot more attractive.

My reading of this is "If we'd have thought about this earlier we may have concluded that manifest URL was the best identifier for a web app, but since Chrome used start URL as the identifier and we never told developers that manifest URLs shouldn't change, we're now going to have to specify what Chrome desktop already does, but with a hack to work around the fact that start URL was always a bad choice as it's the URL which is most likely to change."

The explainer hasn't done anything to change my own conclusions about the best solution (manifest URL as ID, using HTTP redirects for discouraged URL changes), but it would be great if we could hear from other implementors.

To the best of my knowledge, the following user agents all support install/add to home using a web app manifest:

- Android
  - Firefox
  - Chrome
  - Samsung Internet
  - Edge
  - Opera
  - Brave
  - UC Browser
  - QQ Browser
  - Huawei Browser
  - Baidu Browser (caniuse.com says manifest is supported, but I can't find any information)
-  iOS & iPadOS
   - Safari
- Windows
  - Chrome
  - Edge
- MacOS
  - Chrome
  - Edge
- Linux
  - Chrome/Chromium
- Chrome OS
- KaiOS
- [Webian](http://webian.org/) (for completeness, but probably only of interest to me, Webian Shell uses manifest URL as the ID)

As the explainer notes, user agents are not the only consumers of manifests. What about app stores? E.g.
  - Microsoft Store
  - Play Store
  - AppStore (App-Bound Domains)
  - [Kai Store](https://www.kaiostech.com/store/)
  - [PWA Rocks](https://pwa.rocks/)
  - [PWA Store](https://www.pwastore.com/)
  - [ProgressiveApp.Store](https://progressiveapp.store)

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