To help their app integrate more fully with Windows, the Yahoo Mail team wanted to add a couple of new features that took advantage of native Windows functionality. Note: For a demonstration of the basic approach Yahoo took to the conversion process, take a look at this Windows 10 Hosted Web Apps presentation. Instead of two codebases, there continues to be only one main codebase to maintain.
This means that changes to the website are automatically reflected in the UWP app. The WebView provides a specialized browser based on the Microsoft Edge engine that is contained in a Windows Store app and points to their website. The web app itself continues to be hosted on a remote website. The wrapped web app turned into a Universal Windows Platform (UWP), using a WebView. In the case of the stationery, this also meant keeping their relationship with third-party vendors intact as well as internal processes for creating holiday stationery.
This allowed them to keep their stationery and other user-favorite features. To ensure they could keep their critical features intact, the team at Yahoo Mail wrapped their existing web app, creating an app that worked on Windows with minor tweaks to their original code. As a company, Yahoo saw the opportunity to leverage a single codebase across multiple platforms and jumped at the chance. Likewise, the Yahoo Mail web developers wanted to keep using JavaScript, their language of choice, in which they were already highly proficient. Retaining existing functionality, such as the much-loved stationery, was critical to the team at Yahoo Mail. “We saw that Microsoft could let us essentially wrap our web app in a desktop app and get the best of both worlds,” said Josh Jacobson, director of product management for Yahoo Mail. In addition to reusing their existing codebase, Yahoo was also able to extend the codebase with features normally only found in a native app.
Yahoo found this out firsthand when they realized they could use the Windows bridge to bring their browser version of the Yahoo Mail app to Windows 10. Creating a Hosted Web App (HWA) is a great way to fast track an app into the Windows Store when you already have an existing web app.
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