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Comment by wayneftw | Hacker News Reader

Finally! Now if someone will build a browser that will add the missing push notifications feature to PWAs, web apps on iOS might have some semblance of parity with Android.

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Apple will only add push notifications to PWAs if enough people move away from Apple devices for lack of PWA push notifications. Once the quality of PWAs improves to the point that they're indispensable (and I believe we're getting there slowly), Apple will have to comply.

Till then, they're probably not going to do it.

I feel like Apple is incentivized to move slowly on PWAs.

The pros for bringing more features to PWAs: a small subset of users care, and an even a smaller subset of them care enough that they might leave the platform.

The cons: a direct competitor to the app store (imagine Hey as a PWA), undercutting their 30%. For the independent developer, sure, the app store may be great distribution, but I can imagine paying for your own marketing beats the 30% you lose to Apple.

Other browsers still have to use Apple WebKit , I.e they just wrappers around safari so not much change in features

My understanding is that iOS Edge "kind of/mostly" supports push notifications from PWAs. From what I recall seeing, the experience isn't particularly great (notifications are always from Edge itself so you have a hard time filtering them by individual PWA "app", for instance). PWA parity on iOS has seemed an interesting focus of Edge, and it's interesting to see if it will be a losing battle or not.

Highly unlikely. Apple will need to figure out how to get it's 30% cut from those PWAs first.

I’ll give them $ for push notifications alone! Not 30% but it’s worth something if their servers suddenly now must process notifications from hundreds or thousands of new Web apps every year.

Do you have an example? I could not guess where this would help.

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