Microsoft Teams and Progressive Web Apps coming soon to the Windows Store

As part of its Edge Web Summit 2017, Microsoft announced that Progressive Web Apps (PWA) will come to Edge next year. However, what's even more interesting is that Microsoft will start actively crawling the web for quality PWAs and add them to the Windows Store. One of the first of these PWAs to hit the Windows Store will be Microsoft Teams, which Microsoft says will arrive "in the coming months."

Progressive Web Apps are beginning to enter the spotlight as the potential future for apps, largely because of their ability to deliver a native app-like experience across multiple platforms. This cuts down the costs associated with developing multiple native apps that serve the same purpose on different platforms, and could potentially prove useful across mobile and PC. On Windows 10 in particular, PWAs can run completely offline with support for Live Tiles and the Action Center.

With its Windows Store efforts, Microsoft says it will seek out quality PWAs on the web before converting them to APPX files and making them searchable in the Windows Store. While nothing is ever a silver bullet for the dreaded "app gap," PWAs could have the potential for drawing big apps into the Windows Store without requiring companies to spend capital on maintaining a separate, native app. This also makes Windows 10 S a little more attractive, assuming PWAs grow into current expectations.

That brings us to Microsoft Teams, which currently has a desktop app that isn't present on the Windows Store. It seemed like an odd omission when Teams was launched earlier in 2017, but things are starting to come more into focus now that Microsoft has revealed plans to bring PWAs to the Windows Store.

There's no word on when exactly we can expect Teams to hit the Windows Store. However, Microsoft says PWAs will hit Edge next year and will be available by default in Insider builds starting in October.