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Comment by sacrosanct | Hacker News Reader

> The only major hurdle to this is Apple continuing to treat web apps as second class citizens on iOS

If you add a site to iOS' homescreen it automatically becomes a PWA. The best example I found of a site fully leveraging this feature is Cryptee[0]. They talk about the PWA thing here: https://crypt.ee/download

[0] https://crypt.ee/

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The whole add to home screen process is needlessly convoluted. It would be nice if there was something similar to Smart Banners for PWAs: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/webkit/promoting_a...

You just click "Share -> Add To Home Screen." I understand that that's technically more clicks than a smart banner but hardly "convoluted"

I think it's convoluted relative to a Smart Banner. Smart Banners give users a clear call to action, and they're not buried in a menu somewhere.

It's hard to make this point without linking to a screenshot, but the share menu is incredibly bloated. To get to the add to home screen button a user has to know it's in the share menu (which is just an unlabeled icon), and then scroll past the following menu items:

- An options button (which leads to another menu)

- Air Drop

- Share via text message (with several different contacts listed individually to share with)

- Copy

- Add to Reading List

- Add Bookmark

- Add to Favorites

- Add to Quick Note

- Find on Page

Adding to your own home screen under a "share" menu is something probably 90% of users would never think of.

I agree it's MUCH better than it used to be (and huge credit to Jen Simmons and her team for making this possible). However Safari APIs are still WAY behind Chrome/Android and I think this is probably intentional to push developers into using the App Store so Apple can collect their 30% tax

https://fugu-tracker.web.app/

It's absolutely intentional, but going to slowly get better even as they drag their feet

i wonder when someone is going to sue apple over this absurd limit. There's 0 justification for it, it's almost the definition of racket.

Fastmail does this too, and it works extremely well.

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