PWAs Now Support Windows 11 App Actions

Microsoft Edge version 137 is shaping up to be one of the most momentous releases in this Chromium-based browser’s history. In addition to the general availability of Game Assist and the several other new features that Laurent reported, it also delivers platform support for Windows 11 App Actions to developers who create Progressive Web Apps (PWAs).

“App Actions on Windows are now available for Progressive Web Apps (PWAs),” the Microsoft Edge team announced. “Starting with Edge version 137, you can now publish your PWA to the Microsoft Store to enable App Actions on Windows.”

This is interesting for a lot of reasons, the most obvious being that the App Actions feature in Windows 11 is about 17 seconds old. App Actions debuted as a hard-coded feature of Click to Do with support for just a handful of in-box apps, and that release didn’t come to the public in stable until two weeks ago in this month’s Patch Tuesday update. Then, at Build 2025 last week, Microsoft announced App Actions as a new platform capability for developers, with an API that targets the Windows App SDK and C#/C++ languages.

Conceptually, App Actions are like a modern version of the Windows 8/RT contracts feature that allowed then-modern apps to communicate their features to the system and each other. (And contracts live on in Windows 11 via the Share interface.) App Actions work similarly, though the target here is so-called agentic workflows: Apps can register individual capabilities that can then be accessed by the system and other apps.

Microsoft says that one PWA, for Goodnotes, is already using this feature, so you can see it in, um, action. Goodnotes registers itself as a text action you can summon with any selected text onscreen. Interesting.