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Comment by seanabrahams | Hacker News Reader

PWAs haven't taken off because Apple won't implement full Push API support in Safari thus forcing you to go through the App Store if your web site or application needs push notifications. The App Store then complains if you try to publish an app that just wraps your web site so that you can have push notifications. It's... infuriating.

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Seeing all the "enable notifications" popups on every site I visit, I am happy that Apple doesn't allow this for websites.

Sites could easily only prompt this after you've added them to the home screen. Browsers could, do?, also allow users to set a default of deny all notification requests.

The problem is that developers have to spend a significant amount of time and money to get on iPhones because of Apple's policy here. If browsers and devices fully supported PWAs developers could "write once, run everywhere". Instead we have to build separate apps and deal with separate release processes. It's a huge productivity cost.

https://www.ghacks.net/2016/02/19/disable-show-notifications...

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1208251

Yeah so maybe try making a real native app instead of trying to hackaround with web sites?

Apple isn't obligated to implement every single "this is now cool on web"-thing on it's platform to satisfy small niche of people who will find value in them.

Are you an Apple employee? If not, as a consumer or developer why are you not talking from the consumer's point of view? I don't want to install each and every native app. As a developer, I don't want to write and maintain completely separate native apps.

As an iOS user, I’d like you to do both!

The only long-term solution I can think of is to build a competing hardware company, and that’s really hard. But I’m willing to do it.

Further, if Apple were truly concerned with the quality of the apps in their store they would free developers from having to submit apps just to support push notifications. Less time reviewing and rejecting apps, less "low quality" apps in the store, happier developers, happier users.

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