Everything else on this site is about making your website installable: a manifest, a service worker, an icon on a home screen. That covers more than people expect. It does not cover everything, and pretending otherwise wastes a week of somebody's life.
This page is the honest boundary. On the left, what an installed web app genuinely cannot do on a phone today. On the right, what the AppMint Android builder exposes to the same page once it is packaged, and where that is documented.
The documentation lives in one place: the integration guide on freewebtoapk.com, generated from the guide that ships inside the builders themselves. It is not reprinted here - one copy that is always current beats three copies that disagree.
Nine walls, and what is on the other side
| What you want | In an installed web app | Inside a packaged app |
|---|---|---|
| Charge for something | A payment page in the browser. No store billing exists for a PWA, on either platform. | Google Play billing, from your own page: one-time unlocks, subscriptions, live localised prices, entitlements restored on reinstall - in-app purchases. |
| Show ads | Web ad tags only, at web rates. | AdMob banner, interstitial and rewarded formats, with the consent rules that go with them - AdMob, app-ads.txt. |
| Push on iPhone | Only for a site the user has added to the home screen, iOS 16.4 and later, and silently lost if they remove it. | Not applicable - but on Android, topic push to every install from a dashboard: AppMint Push, OneSignal. |
| Reminders with no server | No. Scheduling requires a push server and a live subscription. | Notifications scheduled on the device, exact alarms included, working in aeroplane mode - local notifications. |
| Read and write a real folder | The File System Access API, on desktop Chrome. Not on iOS, not on Android Chrome. | A folder the user grants once, with permission that survives reboots - native folder access. |
| Lock-screen media controls | The Media Session API gets you part of the way; artwork and the seek bar are inconsistent. | A real Android media notification your page drives, plus playback that continues with the screen off - media notifications, background audio. |
| Bluetooth and NFC | Web Bluetooth on Android Chrome only; Web NFC likewise; neither on iOS. | Both, through the bridge, on any Android device that has the hardware - sensors, files and background jobs. |
| Stop screenshots | Not possible. There is no web API for it and there will not be one. | A page can turn screen capture off while it is open - blocking screenshots. |
| Be in the Play Store | Through a Trusted Web Activity, which is a real and good option - and still a website underneath. | A normal APK or AAB, with the store metadata, permissions and ownership checks that implies - Play ownership verification. |
The part people get wrong
Packaging your site does not throw the web away. Inside the app your page is still your page: the same HTML, the same service worker, the same cache. The bridge is an addition - a global object that exists there and nowhere else:
// Runs in Safari, in Chrome, and inside the packaged app.
if (window.WebToApk && window.WebToApk.isOwned('pro_unlock')) {
showProFeatures();
} else {
showWebCheckout(); // the browser path you already had
}That single check is the whole compatibility story. Write it and one codebase serves the browser, the home-screen install and the store listing. Skip it and the page throws on the first device that is not an Android phone.
Where to start reading
- Writing HTML for your app - how a page inside an app differs from a page in a tab, and the rules that keep it working. Read this one first.
- Web APIs bridge - which standard browser APIs work unchanged, and which are answered by the bridge instead.
- In-app purchases - the longest chapter, and the one with the most working code.
- The whole guide - 47 chapters, grouped.
If you are only reading this with a tool
Every documentation page has a plain Markdown twin at the same address with .md appended, and the whole guide is available as a single file at https://freewebtoapk.com/docs/llms-full.txt. This site's own index is at /llms.txt.
Still deciding? The comparison page weighs the three routes - installable web app, Trusted Web Activity, packaged APK - against cost, reach and effort, without a thumb on the scale.