Want service workers to perform background sync? Want push notifications? Sorry, you're out of luck on iOS.
It's a blatantly protectionist policy to make devs provide App Store apps, and it's harming the entire web platform.
No. Not even a little. I don't want these for my native apps. I turn them off for everything.
Once any feature, no matter how exotic, becomes part of "the web" it can never be removed from browsers ever, for the rest of time.
Either that policy must change, or we must be ultraconservative about accepting new "web standards". One or the other. Either choice has disadvantages, but we cannot choose neither.
Did adding location access, or Bluetooth access break the web for you?
Yes, and I'm glad they did.
The article at the top of this discussion is whining about the fact that Apple does this.
I fully disagree. The web platform will no longer be an open platform once Google is able to use it's standard suite of tactics to force everyone on iOS to switch over to Chrome.
As irritating as the iOS WebKit monopoly may be for a handful of web developers, it's the last line in the sand against Google's complete control of the web that forces them to at least try to involve standards bodies.
Apple can be your enemy in every other day and respect, but we all need to line up and support them in this one key area. The open web depends entirely on it.
Now they get to push whatever web feature they want by the web standards committee and is immediately available in Chrome, other Chromium Based browsers and Electron apps, with other browsers needing to implement them to keep up.
All along the ‘open web’ was the exchange from one behemoth to another. It is a two horse race between Google and Apple with Google winning and calling the shots - hence the web developers always supporting Chrome first and calling Safari ‘the new IE’ and telling everyone else using other non-Chromium browser just to switch to one via banners or messages.
This doesn't seem true. Where are the native quality experiences when using a PWA on Android? If it were Apple single-handedly holding things back, we should see plenty of these, right?
If you’re writing code intended only for Android, Apple’s influence in both cases is the same – irrelevant. Yet when you look at only the cases where Apple is irrelevant, people still overwhelmingly continue to choose native Android applications over PWAs. Blaming Apple for this doesn’t seem reasonable.
In the long run, having to install the native app is an inconvenience to those users and their next phone will be less limiting. Apple is famous for their creative destruction, but sticking to their native apps breaks their appetite for innovation.
Drifting in Space [1] has just been announced. After 30 years, the General Magic[2] concept is almost reality apart from the fluid integration of client and server. How can that happen on an iPhone if Apple locks the browser? In other words, sooner or later, they either have to open the browser or become irrelevant.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30502978 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic
You could use capacitor in a web view to recycle most of the code.
In addition to making money for Apple and enhancing its platform control, native apps tend to be more power efficient, more responsive, and more consistent with Apple's UI guidelines – features which, in Apple's view at least, lead to a better user experience.
That being said, I personally hate it when web sites (e.g. reddit) demand that I install an app when I just want to use the web site.