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Comment by hutzlibu | Hacker News Reader

"On a purely technical level the main thing stopping PWA adoption"

I rather think, the main thing stopping PWA are that browsers still can not decide how to treat them. In some ways you can just do anything unrestricted and in other areas your PWA gets treated and limited like a random untrusted website, with no way to get needed rights. At least that was my experience last time I messed with it.

It is of course a problem to do it right, as prompts for confirmation just gets clicked away, but there should be a way to get real user consent for a proper app, that people trust.

But Apple for example wants to keep their app store under their control, so they surely won't provide an easy way to bypass the normal app store by giving developers a way to ship full apps just through the browser.

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Go to any webpage/PWA, hit the share button, hit “add to home screen“.

That’s it. It’s not complicated or restricted in any way.

Its not intuitive for the average user. "Share" does not usually imply "Install" , and the add to home screen option for me is way down in the menu.

You’re not wrong. But at this point Apple has buried EVERYTHING inside the share sheet.

Adding bookmarks, finding on the page, printing, triggering extension actions/scripts… it’s a junk drawer.

It’s not hard to explain to users at least. It certainly could’ve been much worse. Not high praise but it is what it is.

Not on the list of Apple's priorities I guess. If you have an app, you can include a meta tag on your web page and Safari will show users an Get from app-store banner at the top of the page. (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/webkit/promoting_a...) Would it be nice if they did that for PWAs.

Absolutely nobody expects to find installation options under layers of indirection in a share menu.

It’s an intentional choice by Apple that’s hostile to users but very aligned with their strategy to lock users into their own proprietary platform as much as possible.

What do you think the process should be? There are only five buttons on screen, should one of them be permanently dedicated to adding a webpage/PWA to your home screen?

For the record they are the back, forward, share, history/bookmarks, and tabs buttons.

As I explained in another reply, I don’t think Apple is being malicious here. I think they just shove everything that’s not a very common use in there.

I’d be much more inclined to believe that analysis if we were to look at this as a single thing but the moment you look at the consistency of their decisions that they have made regarding the web as a platform it’s close to impossible to impartially come to that same conclusion.

Hm, last time I checked and tried this, there were still limitations, but it has been a while and maybe something improved.

it has changed, at least on MacOS Sonoma. I can "add a website to dock" and it launches in fullscreen if the manifest.json is set up correctly.

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