Tell HN: PWAs on iPhone Still Suck
I don’t want to require my users to install a PWA to their home screen in order to receive Push Notifications, but on iOS, it’s still a requirement despite support for Push Notifications “arriving” in iOS 16.4.
What I hope we can agree on is that your desires are minimal. You have a big anti-feature urge for how you want to experience the web. (I respect that, and am in ways partial!) But there's other people out here who want other behaviors. And since it's obvious the two don't have to be mutually exclusive, I hope we can talk about how to get you what you want, without necessarily imposing your strictures upon everyone else.
Alas, your initial comment has a bit of zeal, forged in exclusionary dogmatisms:
> Anything Apple can do to discourage web apps and force more development of native apps I'm grateful for.
There is little appreciation in the industry for how people feel about this. I think the very idea of Pocket in Firefox drives a lot of people crazy, not because it is bad, but we are so used to vendors harassing us with crap products we just don’t want. Had they called it “Firefox Super Bookmarks” or something like that and not introduced a new off-brand they might have bypassed our defenses and we might have used it and liked it.
Microsoft schools us all by destroying very good products (OneNote before it went 100% cloud) by trying to shove it under our fingernails (three taskbar icons, added as a “printer”, etc.). Trouble is it normalizes this behavior for the rest of the industry which doesn’t see the value destruction Microsoft creates for itself since Windows and Office survive despite it all.
Presumably a lot of people do.
Fortunately I use Android which gives me the possibility to install any browser I want, in my case that means Firefox, Bromite (a Chromium fork without Google bits), Privacy Browser and Lightning. Yes, I have multiple browsers installed, both to test how they behave with things I made as well as to use them for specific purposes.
As a vendor, I would love nothing more than to never have to deal with the app store again to reach iOS users with first class software.
It blocks the kind of low effort notification about hot new listicles on some crappy blog.
There are zero good usecases for notification/push support outside of installed PWAs in the web ecosystem.
[1]: “What’s new in web apps”— https://developer.apple.com/wwdc23/10120
Fixed it for you.
Being this glib is especially old & tired, Figma's been around for years, and years, and years.
The greatest trick Apple ever pulled was being the one platform* that requires Electron to ship PWAs. People use the baggage from having to _ship the entire web runtime_ as circular reasoning. Only reason it changed at all recently is antitrust sent the message it was time to stop. I hope Apple continues to see value in reinvesting in the open web.
* outside Linux.
** Disclaimer: I own a MacBook Pro M2 and have used Apple platforms exclusively in my personal life for 19 years.