How I shipped my PWA to Google Play as a TWA (and what actually went wrong)

I built Money Me as a PWA. It works offline, it's installable, it feels like a native app. At some point I decided to put it on Google Play because people kept asking "is it in the store?"

The TWA route seemed obvious. Wrap the existing PWA in an Android shell, ship it. I figured a day of work, maybe two.

It took me a lot longer than that.

So what is a TWA

A Trusted Web Activity is basically an Android app that opens your website in Chrome, but with the browser UI stripped away. No address bar, no back button. Fullscreen. If you didn't know better you'd think it was a regular Android app.