how would I reliably detect if my PWA is installed or not on chromeos?

Question

So, my site detects if it's being displayed in display-mode: browser to show an install prompt but I want to allow them to open the app in standalone using URI handlers if the PWA is already installed, and webAPK is not relevant since I'm using ChromeOS.

I was looking for API's only available to PWA's but had no luck with that. I found methods that used the beforeinstallprompt event, but I'd have 2 put all my code into it and even if I used an async function that resolved when the event fires it takes a while for it to fire so the user would notice the change.

I would prefer a synchronous approach but if that's not possible I'd want a fast approach instead of waiting on beforeinstallprompt

Answer 1

so, it turns out you could use the appinstalled event to initially set a localStorage key to tell your site it's installed and have an event listener for beforeinstallprompt that checks if that key exists so you can delete it.

Here's a snippet

window.addEventListener("beforeinstallprompt", function() {
  if (typeof localStorage.getItem("installed") == 'string') {
    localStorage.removeItem("installed");
    window.location.reload();
  }
})
window.addEventListener("appinstalled", function() {
  localStorage.setItem("installed", "");
})
const isInstalled = (typeof localStorage.getItem("installed") == 'string');