PWAs not working in Flatpak

Applications
1

Hi, I’ve recently installed Gnome Web on Fedora Atomic looking for a browser that properly supports PWAs but having trouble getting it to work. From what I’ve read PWAs should just work (there’s tons of comments about people using the feature) but attempting to create a PWA throws an error:

The application “…” could not be created: Failed to install desktop file org.gnome.Epiphany.WebApp_[string of characters].desktop: GDBus error:org.freedesktop.portal.Error.InvalidArgument: Desktop entry given to Install() not valid

I do tweak flatpak permissions but Web is already fairly tightly confined so the only thing I changed was to switch off X11 fallback. I’m using the Flathub version - I did notice that the Fedora flatpaks version sets explicit access to a WebApp subprocess but as far as I can tell this is redundant since flatpak grants access to subprocesses anyway…

2

Hi, you’re hitting this bug. There is a fix available, but it has landed yet.

Note: Epiphany web apps are not PWAs since Epiphany doesn’t really support the web app manifest. The only property it supports is the icon URL.

3

Oh and there is a workaround: install Epiphany on your host system and it will work, even though the host system Epiphany won’t actually be used.

(You can probably even create a dummy epiphany file in your PATH and set it to be executable. I bet that would work.)