About six-weeks ago, Google's John Mueller announced in the Google Webmaster Help forums that they have moved support for Google Firebase app indexing out of the Google forums and onto Stack Overflow.
John made it sound like the move was done because the product has matured but really? John said:
App Indexing has grown & so our support has changed slightly. We no longer support App Indexing questions on this forum.For any new questions on App Indexing, we recommend checking with the community at #firebase-app-indexing tag on Stack Overflow or contacting Firebase support team at https://firebase.google.com/support.
He added:
PWAs are essentially websites at their core, and websites are different than apps (though both might be visible in search). There's room for both, both can be awesome!However, given that the search part of app-indexing has somewhat settled down (in a good way), and app developers are often quite different than traditional website owners / makers / optimizers, we thought it would make sense to keep the app-side of the discussion within the app-developer community directly.
Google has clearly shown that app indexing is secondary to web indexing despite pushing hard early on with the solution. In fact, they prioritize AMP URLs above app URLs which still makes no sense to me if the user has downloaded your app.
That being said, in my opinion, moving the support forums outside of Google's core help forums is a big sign.
Oh if you didn't download the Search Engine Roundtable mobile app please do for free on iOS or Android.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
