How to Disable the Google Chrome ‘Enable desktop PWAs local updating’ Flag

The PWA Background Updater

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are designed to bridge the gap between websites and native desktop applications. When you “install” a PWA (like Twitter or a specialized corporate tool) via Google Chrome, it gets its own icon and window. To make these apps feel native, they need to stay up to date. Chrome handles this through a background process managed by the “Enable desktop PWAs local updating” flag. When this is active, Chrome silently checks the original website for changes to the app’s manifest (like a new icon, a changed theme color, or updated background service workers) and applies those updates locally to your installed PWA without requiring you to manually reinstall it.

While this automatic updating is great for consumer apps, it can be a nightmare in strict enterprise environments or for developers performing precise testing. If a company deploys a specific, validated version of an internal PWA to its employees, they do not want Chrome silently altering the app’s metadata or background workers based on server-side changes before the IT department has approved them. If you require absolute version control over your installed web applications and need them to remain static until you explicitly decide to update them, you must disable this automated local updating mechanism.

How to Turn Off Local PWA Updating

You can force Chrome to stop silently updating the metadata of your installed web apps via the experimental flags menu.

1. Open Google Chrome.
2. Click inside the main address bar at the top of the browser window.
3. Type chrome://flags and press Enter.
4. On the “Experiments” page, use the search bar to look for Enable desktop PWAs local updating.
5. If the flag is available, click the dropdown menu next to it and change it from “Default” (or Enabled) to Disabled.
6. Click the blue Relaunch button at the bottom of the screen.

Upon restarting, Chrome will no longer poll the server to silently update the manifest files of your installed PWAs, ensuring they remain exactly as they were when you first installed them.