Web Push for Safari
developer.apple.com
developer.apple.com
Every time I've seen them in action was with spam/clickbait, after someone accidentally subscribed and couldn't remove it.
If you assumed pwa, you can see why they are useful.
Also if slack were mobile friendly, i could see notifications being helpful there too
Web push is a prerequisite for moving a ton of apps out of app stores and into the platform agnostic thin client model of the web: messaging clients, timers, background tasks, transaction/shipping status updates, trading tools, etc
Or maybe it’s because either cross platform web apps are never as good as mobile apps or that the entire web development ecosystem is a clusterfuck of dependency hell, security vulnerabilities in dependencies, complexity, and “ooh shiny” new framework of the week?
Reddit has certainly asked me to download the app, but never forced me.
You just made their point for them.
My point was maybe they should try just not installing the apps and not getting push notifications, etc.
I don’t want the things the developers want. Reddit’s mistake is thinking that I want anything more than headlines, thumbnails, and interstitial advertising.
Reddit is text with images. That is literally the core of what web is.
The only reason Reddit breaks their web version and pushes you towards the app is because Reddit wants to monetize the hell out of reddit, and doing that through the app is easier.
The reason is just that I visit many more websites only once and expect no ongoing relationship with them: that means that I am much less likely to want their notifications AND they are much more likely to want me to have notifications AND they have less to lose by being spammy.
Apps can assume higher organic revisits and also being too spammy can result in the downside of the me the app. A website I had no plan to revisit has no punishment for attempting not spam.
Why would I want to turn my powerful computer into a thin client where I don't have my own software?
For example:
- Sites with chat can send you messages even if you don't have the tab open (or even browser in some cases)
- Online game e.g. board game or chess can push to you when it's your move.
- Home alerts, e.g. that your garage door has been opened
Sure there are a lot of spammy notifications, e.g. sales alerts, news items, etc. that most people probably don't want, but there are genuinely useful use cases.
Perfect for lichess when my mind wonders and I switch to something else.
MS Teams already gives me a lot of push notifications during my work day, and if the browsers starts to do this, I will be overwhelmed with beeping nag-notifications.
Computer clutter is a distraction and lowers productivity.
Push notifications in Safari are only supported on desktop for now.
Essentially web apps will finally have something close to parity with on-device apps.
So the argument about paying anyone 30% is moot.
The snark keeps me from even wanting to engage you...
Facebook tried the whole cross platform web app in a wrapper and decided it wasn’t good enough. Even while Google is extolling then virtues of its own cross platform tooling, it’s moving toward apps that use native frameworks.
Everyone wants web apps to help sell hardware, right up until your app store grows into a money maker. Then the incentives are different.
Regardless, today's mobile systems are much better, web browsers are much better. It is much easier to write a web app that is functionally identical to native than it used to be.
Modern reality. Conversation rates for PWAs are higher than mobile apps because there is less friction in the installation process. Load times are often lower, which can be an overall superior experience. If I'm a small shop, trying to get on someone's mobile device, these items matter a lot. Also development costs are much lower when you can share code for your mobile app and your website.
The value add of being in the mobile stores is pretty minimal. Discovery is poor, search is poor, then there is constant churn in policies, submission process, APIs, development environments/languages, fees, etc. In contrast to this, the browsers hold very very high backwards compatibility. Churn will be in the support libraries or framework you adopt and not fundamental to the platform.
1. Mobile apps convert higher than the web.
https://buildfire.com/mobile-apps-convert-higher/
2. Developers were clamoring for native apps each time. Not the mobile platforms. You act as if the modern web development environment isn’t a clusterfuck of complexity compared to modern IDEs for native apps.
3. Both Apple and Google have initiatives where you can have small instantly installable “applet” equivalents that make downloads fast and the apps are more responsive.
4. Cost is lower for the developer. But at the cost of a much worse user experience.
5. Browsers might have “higher backwards compatibility”. But the dependency hell and ever changing landscape of the front end framework of the week is real.
2) Assumes facts not in evidence. This is not a universal opinion.
3) Still has the gate keepers, yet another platform to write for, etc etc. Lower friction might help vs PWAs, that's something at least.
4) Assumes facts not in evidence.
5) Showing your ignorance here. Front end has been stable for a while. Old stuff still works if you prefer it. Lots and lots of sites still do.
The mobile shill is real... There are reasons to pick mobile over something else. But just shilling the tool and showing your tech bigotry isn't a good way to pick solutions. I'm out.
2. Really? Were you not around when they called Steve Jobs “pretty sweet solution” of web apps a “shit sandwich” in 2007, or when developers complained about non native SDKs on both WebOS and RIMs newer platforms? Are you really claiming that native apps are not more performant than web apps?
3. And those “gatekeepers” allow more monetization than the web ever has.
4. Are you saying that I’m not constantly getting GitHub messages about a security vulnerability somewhere deep down in a dependency chain for an open source project that I contribute to? It’s a popular company sponsored open source project.
The relevant criterium that follows from the argument is the prevalence of real-time notifications in paid apps.
Apple's does.
My wife paid 99¢ to send people Svengoolie stickers.
Think of it this way. When feature parity of browser sandbox closes on everything a desktop app might want, you no longer need to build with electron but can simply ship 5-15MB of js+css and use the stock browser instead.
Similar on mobile.
Which will result in: Smaller downloads. Lower memory footprint. Faster launch.
All this functionality is already available for apps including the security model. Nothing new is happening here. App security is an issue, but it's one big tech is already dumping resources into solving.
But, frankly, browsers have some of the best management features for culling analytics, telemetry, watching the traffic and requests being made. It's many times easier for me to see what a web app is doing on the network, and write something to stop it, as compared to a native app.
I would argue that it has been something closest to the greatest success of any OS.
Especially with all the additional fees carriers are tacking on these days under the guise of reducing spam.
For the first several months, I was getting a message or email every day asking when iOS web push was coming, and the timing couldn't be more perfect that Reddit just effectively shut down their live streaming the same day that Apple finally enabled push.
Basically any situation that is some combination of in-person and online. Sure, you can build and maintain an app and then force people to install it to receive notifications. Or you can use/abuse SMS and force people to give their (highly targetable) cellphone number. But both of those alternatives cost more and are less consumer-friendly.
Either they're not free (which matters when setting up group chats) or they don't have reliable push notifications (because only the group publishing the app can maintain the push infrastructure (which is required) and no one is paying them and it's a lot of work.)
It is actually completely fucked. I've looked into dealing with it myself. Apple has pretty much single-handedly destroyed internet IM. Hopefully this starts to undo the damage.
That's a bold claim when looks at dozens of messaging apps and hundreds of billions of messages sent daily
EDIT: I'm out of comment quota. Being open source hardly matters if the app is siloed. There's no reason we shouldn't be able to have decent XMPP and IRC clients other than Apple jerking their users around. (and before you bitch at me about leaving a socket open for push notifications using up battery, no. That's what the OS is already doing, it suspends the machine without closing the socket and reopens it if it's dead after the next wakeup.)
On top of that there's the issue of at least some of the tech that open source likes to use. Prime example is XMPP which 10 years after introduction of the iPhone still didn't have a compelling mobile story [1]
10 more years later, and yeah. I think the lack of open source messengers is a combination of many things and whatever Apple forced is just a part of it.
[1] https://gultsch.de/xmpp_2016.html In 2016 almost all XEPs references where in early experimental stages.
YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Shopping apps will ping you throughout the day with "recommended" products, ride share apps will ask you to ride with them during the holidays, social apps will ask you to checkout the newest trend.
All sad attempts to get you to open their app. The worst is when apps don't even let you opt out, so you either get useful notifications and advertisements or nothing.
- Home Assistant
- Discord
- Telegram
- Element
- Buienalarm (weather app)
- RSS reader
- Floatplane.com
- Several sites/forums with comment sections, to notify me of replies etc.
- Gitlab pipeline notifications
- Some smaller services I'm probably forgetting
Basically, anything but the scammy sites that try to force notifications upon you. Generally interactive stuff which I feel shouldn't have a 300MB app with access to file systems (and there's not a lot that _really_ needs an app these days).
To combat the blogspam from Google searches, HN/Reddit links, and whatever else tries to shove stuff down my throat, I have notifications disabled by default so I don't even see the prompts; I manually toggle them on, and I think that should be the default. I also close any website the second I see a popup for newsletters, notifications, or even cookie popups the second they block my reading, unless I can't find the information I need anywhere else.
Joke aside, it allows PWAs to more fully replace native apps, which is great.
I think this is the reason Apple is reluctant to add it. There are very valid reasons why a user would opt to receive web-push notifications, but its mostly niche apps/usages. The vast majority of push authorization banners are from sites you visit for the first time, with hardly any engagement or interaction nor clear intention of allowing web-push ("We think you want unsolicited notifications because it is better for our business model")
While there is no fix for dark-pattern usage of web-push, browsers and OS UX must make it super easy to withdraw notification consent anytime.
The difference for me is straightforward: Email is for messages the user might want to keep, notifications are messages that the user doesn't need to keep. (To extend this further, messaging systems aren't for notifications either, but rather for interactive dialogue.)
This simply isn‘t possible at all on iOS as of now, and on macOS it requires registering an Apple developer account, as far as I understand.
Apple’s long resistance to allowing ‘web push’ on iOS has held back PWA adoption. And they’ve obviously never admitted it, but this policy protected the hegemony of the App Store, and therefore Apple’s control over the whole ecosystem. The absence of web push on arguably the world’s most important web browser (iOS Safari) was a feature for them. It constrained PWAs to niche, toy use cases - if you wanted to make a real app with notifications (like most apps) and you wanted it to be available to iPhone owners, you had no choice but to follow Apple’s technical and content restrictions and generally play to their fiddle and be very polite to them.
So with that incentive structure in place, I didn’t hold out much hope for the situation ever changing except possibly through some anti-trust thing.
But now it’s happening. Why? What does Apple get out of this move in return for the loss of control it is likely to mean for them? Can anyone shed any light? Perhaps it’s about staying a couple of steps ahead of antitrust suits they can see coming down the line?
The only caveat I can see is it requires a $100/year developer certificate. That doesn’t sound like a major caveat to me. That cost is nothing if it means you can build one app that runs everywhere.
I guess maybe Apple could still revoke your certificate if they don’t like what you’re doing with your web app, ie hamstring your webapp by taking away your push notification ability. But I’m guessing (hoping) this would be a very rare hostile ‘intervention’ compared to the common experience today of every app update being subjected to review by Apple and possibly rejected for arcane reasons.
Does it? I know it did for sending notifications in Safari on macOS, but I think this time it does not. See [0]: "You don’t need to join the Apple Developer Program to send web push notifications."
[0]: The only caveat I can see is it requires a $100/year developer certificate
Apple shipped Service Workers in WebKit in 2021. Are web apps much better now than in 2017? Frankly it seems about the same. The best web apps are still exercises in minimalism like Wordle, which don't need Service Workers or Web Push.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/ServiceWork... shows support in Safari 11.1, shipped in 2018?
Because if it's as easy as on Android, then why would anyone bother with apps, if a webapp can do?
"… no Apple Developer account is required to reach Safari users."
The big advantage of the current centralized model is that it's easier to coalesce notifications and the OS only has to maintain a single connection. Would hate to see my battery take a hit as a result of a move away from that model.
A big win for freedom. Thank you Apple.
Reality: users blindly click "do not allow" push notification dialog the way they already do with browser notification permission dialogs, location access, "allow cookies" banners etc
Stop asking for permissions before you need them
Hopefully this either moves all of that to the web or forces Apple to deal with the problems with their platform.