How to Remove Chrome Logo from PWA App Home Screen Link (Android O Preview)

Note that if the phone doesn’t have a google play account enabled then all pwa will be installed as a bookmark only. This happened to us using a new phone to test our pwa

This is simple security measure as the PWA is literary opening the browser window and small icon signalizes which browser is used:

Starting with Android Oreo, every shortcut added from Chrome (and potentially other browsers as well, but they are not working now) will have a Chrome badge at the lower right corner of the icon.

Anyway, PWA seems to be abandoned as the new WebAPK feature is significantly more powerful and actually, supports normal icons

With WebAPK enabled, icons are back to normal as we were used in Android before Oreo

Source for quotes: https://medium.com/@firt/android-oreo-takes-a-bite-out-of-progressive-web-apps-30b7e854648f

Above answer is not accurate except for the part that Chrome had the issue of adding Chrome badge to App icon, which is changed in the following updates.

Before getting into whats wrong, here is how web apps are added to home screen.

1) As a simple shortcut(like a bookmark), when the users web browser don't have service worker support(which all recent versions of major browsers have support now), targeted web URL don't have a valid manifest.json and service worker files configured(this can be validated in Application-> Manifest and Service worker tabs in chrome developer tools). In this case, what is added to home screen is not an APK and the bookmark kind of shortcut was represented by a specific version of Chrome with a badge.

2) As an installed APK: When the targeted URL have a valid Manifest.json, service workers and one of supported Chrome version is used, Chrome for Android uses WebAPK to build and sign an .APK file with the package name starting "org.chromium.webapk". Read here for more details on apk generation and PWA distribution here.

Whats not accurate in the above answer/linked article,

1) The chrome badge is not a security measure. Chrome team added the badge for web apps created as bookmark/URL shortcut as it was not using WebApk in some particular version. Badge is a simple visual representation which was later withdrawn.

2) PWA is not abandoned in favor of WebApk. WebApk is part of PWA solution, which compliments PWA by building an installable APK file to get the native app like behavior. WebApk is used to build .apk files by Chrome for Android. Here is official read me file.

So if you are building a PWA, you can still be assured you are not left behind in outdated/abandoned/being abandoned technology. Its still a constantly progressing positively, which got iOS support for service worker in march-2018(iOS 11.3), making it the last major browser vendor aboard PWA game.