Re: [w3c/manifest] Way to detect if a web app is installed (Issue #1092)

@drubino-mozilla wrote:
> What do you have in mind as the definition of an "app window"?

@dmurph Would I be right to assume that "app window" is a less formal term for "application context", or at least a UI element which contains an application context?

_"A [top-level browsing context](https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/document-sequences.html#top-level-browsing-context) that has a manifest applied to it is referred to as an application context."_ ([section 1.16.5](https://w3c.github.io/manifest/#applying) of the specification)

This is independent of any kind of UI design.

On Android and iOS I think it's fairly obvious because the application context is presented as a separate application window in the window switcher with its own icon, separate from the browser application. You're either in the browser app or you're in a separate app.

In the [implementation](https://github.com/WebThingsIO/shell) I'm working on it's more fluid that that. Users can deep link in and out of different applications using the same browsing context. When they navigate to a URL inside the navigation scope of an installed app, the manifest is dynamically applied to the browsing context to create an application context. Then if they navigate outside the scope of the app the manifest is un-applied, or a different manifest is applied.

Things a developer might want to know are whether the app is installed (e.g. to stop suggesting the user install the app) and what the current display mode is (e.g. to subtly modify the UI design in fullscreen display mode), but I don't think these two things should be conflated (which is why "navigator.standalone" is a bad name).

BTW you also can't assume that the display mode defined in the manifest is the display mode used by the user agent when launching an app, because all display modes are optional for user agents to implement and they have a fallback chain.

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