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Handle links to your Progressive Web Apps

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Native apps on many operating systems can handle links. When associated URLs are activated, native apps can request to be launched instead of the web browser, to create a more engaging experience for these apps.

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) can also handle links in a similar way.

The operating system that your PWA is installed on automatically launches your PWA for any link that refers to content that's within the scope of the PWA, when either of the following conditions are met:

  • The PWA was installed from the Microsoft Store on Windows.
  • The PWA was installed by using Microsoft Edge, and Microsoft Edge is the default browser on the device.

No code is required for automatic link handling to work, but end users can opt-out of automatic link handling. To opt-out of automatic link handling:

  1. In Microsoft Edge, navigate to edge://apps.

  2. Find the PWA you want to disable automatic link handling for and click Details.

  3. On the PWA details page, under the Link handling section, click the toggle button.

The edge://apps details page for the PWAmp music player app, showing where the link handling toggle button is

The manifest of a PWA defines which part of the hosting domain the PWA is scoped to. For example, the www.contoso.com domain name may have a PWA defined under www.contoso.com/app with its scope set to /app. In this case, all the web pages available within the www.contoso.com/app path are part of the PWA scope. However the web pages within the www.contoso.com/foo path are not part of the PWA scope. Furthermore, web pages available at bar.contoso.com/app or www.contoso.co.uk are also not part of the PWA scope.

Scope extensions make it possible for a PWA to capture navigation to paths, subdomains, or even sites other than its own scope. This can be useful for PWAs that span multiple domains for localization purposes. For example, a PWA may span contoso.com, contoso.co.uk, and contoso.fr.

Note: The scope extensions feature is currently in origin trial. See Experimental features and origin trials. To find out more about the state of development of this feature in Chromium, check out the Web app scope extensions feature at Chrome Platform Status.

Once the feature can be used in Microsoft Edge, we will document it here. In the meantime, to learn more about how scope extensions will work, see the explainer document on the WICG repository.

See also