Feature Request: Support version field in Web App Manifest to align with app store requirements

[CodingDive]

Thank you for all your work on this specification. For the first time, I feel that web apps are ever closer to native app experiences. ❤️

Currently, when installing PWAs on Windows, they always display as version "1.0" under Apps > Installed apps, with no way to override this through the manifest. In the above example, the version in my package.json is 0.2.8, not 1.0.

Could we add a version field to the manifest specification? This would not only give developers control over their app versioning but also align with app store requirements. Tools like PWABuilder already require version information when packaging apps for various app stores, so having this in the manifest would provide a single source of truth for versioning across platforms.

When not using manifest.json directly, but a build tool to generate the manifest like vite, it'd also be very easy to use the version of our package.json.

// vite.config.ts
import clientVersion from './package.json';

export default defineConfig({
  plugins: [
    VitePWA({
      manifest: {
       version: clientVersion,
     }
    })
  ]
})

[christianliebel]

@CodingDive Thank you for your feature request.

My initial feedback is that the concept of versioning in app stores differs from that of web applications. In app stores, each update requires uploading a static bundle that is assigned a specific version number. This version remains fixed once submitted. In contrast, developers of web applications can update even single files at any time without altering the version number in the manifest. Therefore, the version number displayed in the list of installed apps may even be misleading.

I'm looping in the vendors here (@marcoscaceres @diekus @dmurph @saschanaz) for their feedback.

[aarongustafson]

We talked about this for the App Info spec: w3c/manifest-app-info#1