Hello WICG,
We would like to propose to bring a native capability to the web that allows applications to launch when the user logs into the OS.
Problem Many operating systems offer the ability to configure an application to launch automatically when the user logs into their OS session. Users can engage with those applications as soon as they log into the OS. Certain class of native applications including email and chat apps have been using this capability. We aim to add this capability to the web platform to empower web developers to provide the same first-class experience with their PWAs.
Proposal This is a powerful feature that would entail a performance and user-experience cost with applications launching at login. So, we think it should extend the standard permission registry with the “run-on-os-login” enum value. We propose JS APIs to prompt user a permission dialog and enable/disable the capability based on the user’s choice. We also propose an alternative way to get the user’s choice and enable the capability in the installation flow of a PWA via its web app manifest.
Here’s the exaplainer. For the folks who have read and provided feedback on our initial proposal, we updated the explainer with the API approach on May 27th, 2020. Here’s the list of issues we’re tracking.
Looking forward to your feedback.
Thanks, Jungkee Song on behalf of the feature crew