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Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

How does Apple dragging their feet on implementing the Web Push notification standard, that is necessary for PWAs, in anyway help in that situation? Literally every browser except Safari implemented the the standard, and not out of some noble anti-Google crusade. PWAs threaten the App Store monopoly's moneyhose.

How does Apple releasing proprietary web standards just for Safari, like Safari Push Notifications, help in anyway with the purported problem of companies stamping out web standards without consensus? It seems like it's only a problem when Google does it, but when Apple does it, it's Safari "helping Firefox just exist".

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Push notifications are now available in iOS.

And so I will be looking forward to the magical era of PWAs replacing all mobile applications because clearly push notifications was what was holding them back all these years.

Even though a tiny fraction of mobile apps use them but I guess we will ignore that.

Every single airline app on my phone is there only because of push notifications (which work more reliably than texts when traveling internationally with different SIMs). The same goes for most food delivery apps.

Food delivery apps seem to immediately abuse any form of push notifications in order to send spam. Lyft uses the same push stream for both driver ETA and 10% off coupons. They are indeed more reliable than SMS, yet I turn them off almost as fast as apps start to use them.

> Food delivery apps seem to immediately abuse any form of push notifications in order to send spam.

Oh, definitely. But if they do (and don't at least give me a way to immediately opt out of that) the app is gone from my phone – and they have no other way of reaching me. Beats the absolute nightmare that is SMS notifications and spam, in my view.

Android provides hooks to filter notifications from apps, while iOS does not, making the notification experience far worse. Allowing web push lets you filter notifications in a browser extension instead.

How do you mean? I can silence or block notifications completely from apps on iOS, and they cannot even send notifications before I approve them to do so.

Are you saying that Android has third party filters that surveil all your notifications in the name of blocking ones you might not want to see?

I'm an android only user, and I think what GP is referring to is that apps can categorise their notifications. In your food example, an app might have categories for "delivery updates" versus "special offers", and you can go into the notification settings for any app and turn on or off categories.

Yes, Android has a notifications API that lets you process all notifications. (This is in addition to the channels mentioned in the sibling comment.) This is not possible on iOS, except maybe for web notifications with a browser extension. I find that situation untenable for any power user of productivity apps, akin to using email without filter rules.

Actually the iphone was planned to use PWAs in the start, but Steve Jobs switched to native apps after realizing that performance and usability was going to be poor.

He was right and still is. Not that it's impossible to implement a good PWA, all you have to do is manage your state and interface in a way that no interaction takes longer than 50ms to compute. But most developers are not able to deliver than, most don't even think about UIs in this sort of way.

And V8 GC behaviour is still terrible and an unbelievable battery hog.

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