Based on confusion and complaints by users when Discourse asks users to install a PWA (app) on their devices, I have written a stand-alone plugin for any Discourse admin who wishes to disable this PWA banner and install request (which we also run on our forum here at unix.com):
https://community.unix.com/t/a-link-to-install-an-android-app-for-this-community/382073
A little note on Discourse and PWA......
It's understandable why Discourse would like to load their code on your device versus in the cache of the web browser. Discourse consistently gets low SEO marks because it is very slow to load the entire SPA (single page application) on your device. However, if Discourse can get users to download most of the code as an PWA (progressive web app), this will make the user experience faster. In practice, installing Discourse as an PWA could have a positive SEO effect for Discourse sites.
The problem is that the Discourse "install banner" is too "in your face" according to users. Basically, users are annoyed to be asked in pop-ups (before) or banners (now) if they want to install Discourse, the app, on their devices. Instead of simply having this as a user option in the user preferences, Discourse has decided every user must see a banner offering their app as a PWA, as if they are very proud of this achievement.
I only created this plugin after Android users complained about it. Before they complained, I had never seen this issue since I'm an iOS user and currently the Discourse PWA is not supported on iOS. That seems to be changing, so I have read.
Hence after user complaints about getting pop-ups or banners to install the Discourse PWA, based on these user complaints, I decided to write a plugin which strips the PWA install code from our site.
This means no one will get these confusing and annoying PWA install requests from this site any more (unless Discourse modifies their layout code, in that case let me know and I'll modify the plugin to adapt to changes).
Note: If anyone wants to learn how to write these kinds of Discourse "utility plugins" in Ruby / Rails please let me know! We are currently running 11 "utility plugins" I wrote, so I'm kind'a getting the hang of it...
