Changes to PWA manifest not applying

Question

I'm having trouble applying updates made to Progressive Web App manifest. Updating stuff works otherwise just fine, but if I change something from my manifest, like background_color, the launch screen color will not change. I have monitored my server to see that manifest.json is indeed fetched. Restarting phone doesn't apply the changes either, the only way seems to be to uninstall the PWA and add back to home screen.

On desktop, chrome developer tools show that the manifest is correctly fetched and the changes can be seen in the dev tools. Is this expected behavior? Is there a way to make changes to manifest apply after the PWA has already been installed?

Answer 1

This has been addressed in the official The Web App Manifest docs:

Note: If you update your manifest.json file in the future, those changes won't be automatically picked up by the users unless they re-add your app to their home screen.

So, this is indeed the expected behavior.