Re: [w3c/manifest] suggest in standard calling website->webapp process unified "add to home screen" or such in all browsers (not install) (Issue #1096)

Thanks for your detailed thoughts.

I think we need to slow down and take a step back here.

1. You have one quite concrete request which is that we replace the terminology "install" with "add to home screen".
2. You've made a lot of very wide-reaching statements asking for a rethink of how we frame the idea of web apps, the differences between "bookmarks", "shortcuts" and "apps", what we focus on, etc.

You raise a lot of valid points and many of the things you say here are things we've discussed for years (e.g. the confusion between creating a "shortcut" and "installing an app", and what that means to the user; whether we should call it "add to home screen" versus "create shortcut" versus "install app"). These are things that have been debated to great length both here and within the walls of individual browser vendors (in my experience: at Google, but presumably at Apple and elsewhere) throughout the whole time we've worked on the PWA platform and the manifest spec. That doesn't mean we have all the answers, but you are entering into a conversation that has been going on for over a decade, so it would help if you started by understanding the domain of the spec (i.e. what a spec can and can't mandate), and making some small concrete suggestions to improve the spec, rather than coming in with an essay about how we need to rethink how everything works.

Most of the things you say here are not things we can (or should) mandate in the spec. We purposely leave matters related to UI, branding, and explaining concepts to the user, up to the user agent, so we do not create inflexible rules and user agents are able to experiment and change. For example, the idea of a "shortcut" means different things on different operating systems, and it's something that browsers and OSes can figure out, not something we can or should mandate in the spec.

I would suggest that you refrain from statements like "this standard does a lot of unnecessary things" - just because you don't see certain features as core or important doesn't mean we didn't have a reason to put them here. Every feature in this spec was considered a valuable addition over the past decade (in fact, we took a lot of things out because only one vendor wanted them -- what remains has support of multiple browser vendors). I would also suggest that you avoid making statements about "legal requirements" unless you are a lawyer (and if so, GitHub is likely not the place to have those discussions).

On your concrete request to rename "install" to "add to home screen" -- what we call it in the spec is fairly moot. The terminology "[install](https://www.w3.org/TR/appmanifest/#dfn-installed)" as defined in the spec _does not_ force browsers to use that word, and again, we can't force browser manufacturers to label it any particular thing in their UI. They can (and do) use other terms like "Add to home screen", etc. It's just the label we give that concept in the spec, and it doesn't really matter what we call it. However, I think "install" is the best term for this as it's general across all platforms (your suggestion of "add to home screen" is extremely mobile-centric, as desktop platforms typically don't have what would be called a "home screen"). I get that you're saying "install" doesn't actually copy assets to the user's device, but the copying of data is really an implementation detail. From the user's perspective, "install" is when you commit to having an app icon on your device that you can open again.

If you want to change the terminology used by actual browsers when presenting the "install UI" to users, this isn't the right place to do it. You should be discussing it with browser vendors. But note that on that side of the fence, browser vendors have also had long discussions about how to best present this UI (i.e.: we've landed on the terminology "install" after years of calling it other things, because we actually want users to think of this as installing an app just as they would install a native app).

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