Is Apple trying to kill PWAs? | Hacker News Reader

Is Apple trying to kill PWAs?

ionicframework.com

47 pointsparsadotsh12 comments

Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22686602

Edit: it looks like this article's main point was discussed pretty extensively in the previous thread, including at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22688294.

They do stuff like this not because they want to kill the web, but because Apple will always do what it thinks is in the best interests of the company and its customers.

(Who comes first seems to depend on what the technology in question is.)

In the case of WebKit, it's clear they see these "privacy-enhancing" features as a benefit to both, and so they go all-in.

Like removing the floppy drives. Lots of people had good use cases for them but they believed it was the best move for everyone in the long term.

Wow, this was the ELI5 article that worked for me. Now I finally get it for the context of homescreen apps.

I still don't get homescreen apps. When I put a bookmark on my home screen, it just open safari to that page. It's not it's own app, all the other tabs are still there. /confused

It depends on how the app is written I guess. For example, make a bookmark of this demo PWA app on your homescreen https://airhorner.com. Notice that it opens itself in a full screen mode, no safari controls are shown.

Thanks! that's neat.

I found this:

> Set the apple-mobile-web-app-capable meta tag to yes to turn on standalone mode.

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ap...

You need to put special markup in your HTML (and maybe some specific JS) for it to behave like an app and hide the tab bar.

It still kills tools like Twine in browser though: https://www.reddit.com/r/twinegames/comments/fp1ro2/ios_user...