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Comment by corv | Hacker News Reader

Also note Apple has added PWA support in iOS 11.3

https://medium.com/@firt/progressive-web-apps-on-ios-are-her...

Unfortunately, their PWA "add to homescreen" feature is so bad, it's unusable. I've had to tell my users not to add to the homescreen.

For example: sending a PWA to background causes it to die. For my music player app, this is a showstopper; the audio stops playing.

Bringing the PWA to the foreground causes a full refresh. Again, showstopper for my PWA.

>Unfortunately, their PWA "add to homescreen" feature is so bad, it's unusable.

As it relates to audio apps -- not generally.

Well, it does limit use cases to applications that (a) don't need any background activity and (b) don't need to maintain stateful network connections. Granted, (b) is an issue for native iOS apps, too, but it's something I find mildly frustrating.

Also a PWA which is "added to homescreen" actually LOSES access to at least some APIs (I know for a fact that getUserMedia is disabled when a page is added to a home screen).

This led to us needing to tell our users to NEVER add the page to the homescreen (pwa or otherwise) or the app will stop working, which confused many and made other suspicious (IMO rightly so, that's such a fucking weird thing to have to specify!)

This is really frustrating to me. Why are PWAs second class citizens when it comes to getUserMedia? Why is Apple perfectly happy to cripple websites when a user has specifically pinned it to the home screen, but allows full featured access in the browser?

Are they really worried mobile websites will overthrow the App Store in popularity?

Sometimes I really feel Safari is the new IE.

So in talking with some Safari engineers a while back when iOS 11 first came out, they say it's a technical limitation (Safari is a somewhat different codebase than the "web views" are on iOS, the webViews being more integrated into the OS), and technically an app added to the homescreen is run in a webView.

That being said, it does really suck, and it's something they NEED to get solved before the possibility of taking Safari and iOS seriously in the web-app space happens.

I'm not sure what's actually new there. You've been able to 'install' full-screen web pages to the home screen with a custom icon since before iOS 2.0 and the original app store.

The capabilities have grown over time as Safari on iOS supports more PWA features, but the article seems to be framing this as a new ability to install apps, when that isn't very new at all.

Service workers provide way more capabilities than just creating a shortcut. Google’s doc[1] provides a good introduction, but essentially you get things like push notifications and background sync in a cross-compatible way (chrome, Firefox, Edge, and now Safari). I’m particularly excited about the caches and sync APIs, which allows sites to be rendered and be interactive even when you’re offline or have a flaky connection.

1: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/primers/servi...

I don't think Mobile Safari has push notification support yet.

Safari for iOS doesn't support background sync or push notifications.

It’s relatively poor. The pinafore.social mastodon app doesn’t work as a PWA in iOS at all because redirecting to a mastodon insance for authentication switches back to the browser, and cookies aren’t shared between the Safari app and PWAs.

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