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Comment by hmottestad | Hacker News Reader

I love developing PWAs because I can quickly and easily make an app for myself and my family that works without having to provision their devices or pay a dev license to Apple. I also use it at work for internal apps. It’s great for all those things.

It’s very obvious to me that I’m a second priority for Apple. Dark mode breaking in iOS 17 and still broken 5 months later. Updating the app is tricky, and making users update is even trickier. Haven’t even bothered to try push notifications.

One pro though is that when my brother wanted to use a PWA I had developed it worked flawlessly on his Android phone. Cross platform support is a big pro in my opinion.

Maybe Apple will fix dark mode with iOS 18, let’s hope they also fix it when using guided access (which was buggy in iOS 16).

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Looks like Apple is going to fix dark mode in iOS 18 by dropping support for PWAs altogether in my part of the world.

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/02/08/ios-17-4-nerfs-web-apps...

Looks like Apple is just going to blame the EU. They are officially pulling PWA support on iOS in Europe.

So fuck me I guess :(

https://9to5mac.com/2024/02/15/ios-17-4-web-apps-european-un...

You seem to be conflating "PWA" with the Safari + Home Screen integration that allowed users to add a web[site|app] (PWA or not) to the iOS Home Screen. Apple had to remove this to comply with the DMA.

It's now the responsibility of alternative browser engine vendors to integrate with Shortcuts so that you can add PWAs and other web[sites|apps] to the Home Screen using your browser engine of choice. The additional benefit of this is that different PWAs can use different browser engines.

> Apple had to remove this to comply with the DMA.

This has yet to be made clear to me.

Could you attempt to convince us?

The DMA requires that Apple not favor Safari. A direct integration between Safari and Home Screen favors Safari, and so is not allowed under the DMA.

So...they're tearing out all OS features that favor Safari?

or just the features they're motivated not to offer a path to using for other publishers?

(Like, webapp support)

From Apples own documentation I get the feeling that someone discovered that there was no easy way to allow their PWA support to work with other browser engines. Due to a lack of priority, running out of time and general malicious compliance they just nuked PWAs instead of fixing them.

I wonder if the DMA contains some sort of requirement that features not be removed. To force Apple to make PWAs interoperable with other browser engines instead of just nuking them.

Pretty much.

You emphasized “all” to imply there are so many, but honestly I can’t think of much beyond what they’re already mitigating to comply with the DMA.

You’ll get a browser selection screen now, other engines will be allowed, default browser choice gets further expanded in terms of implementation so it essentially ensures you never have to touch Safari.

The only thing that is being torn out is PWA installation on Home Screen because it would be yet another significant architectural change that comes with some significant engineering effort during a time of crunch, when the install rate of PWAs is abysmal as it is, even on other OSs.

Seems fair to me.

Siri won't learn from Safari activity, anymore?

and a dozen other similar questions...

> Siri won't learn from Safari activity, anymore?

Can you clarify what you mean by this?

If Siri would be the one benefiting (which is what you seem to be saying?) then it wouldn’t give Safari an unfair advantage.

No virtual assistants have been designated as gatekeepers under the DMA so preferential treatment of Siri would still be allowed.

That said, to my knowledge Siri doesn’t “learn” from Safari in the sense that it improves or trains on Safari user data.

Instead Safari, and all other apps, including third party apps, can provide information to Siri to be shown during search as well as providing shortcuts so the app can be controlled via Siri. Users have control over this to a degree so they can exclude information from certain apps.

Alternative voice assistants offer similar APIs to receive information and support voice commands for third party services.

> and a dozen other similar questions...

I’m all ears.

What are you talking about?

With iOS 17.4 in the EU, you can no longer make a web app (PWA) that uses a full screen window with no browser ui controls. No longer use local storage for the web app's data, and no longer send push notifications and show badges on the home screen icon for web apps.

Third party browsers can't add this functionality back. How do you expect them to make push notifications work with PWAs?

> With iOS 17.4 in the EU, you can no longer make a web app (PWA) that uses a full screen window with no browser ui controls.

Are you sure? Go to https://sindresorhus.com/screenfull/, tap "Request", and you should see a full-screen website. Any [website|webapp|PWA] can do this with Safari. (Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/CTWFPol) Third-party browsers using their own browser engines can do whatever they like.

> How do you expect them to make push notifications work with PWAs?

Third-party browsers using their own browser engine will have to create their own support for web notifications, just as Apple does for Safari. Presumably, they'll leverage the same infrastructure they use on non-iOS platforms.

I’m not in the EU so I can’t test it.

But those that are are all claiming that all their PWAs are no longer full screen, lost all their local storage, and push notifications stopped working.

That's good. The Fullscreen API isn't exactly the same as a PWA, but it might go a long way to make my PWAs feel a bit more native again.

I see that the support for the Fullscreen API isn't available in iOS 17.3 but will be available once 17.4 lands.

"Added support for the Fullscreen API on iOS. (118083593)"

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-release-not...

That’s interesting.

I use that with a site I make that I want to look and feel more like an app and so I use the PWA fullscreen stuff now.

I have no need for all the browser url bar and buttons and it just wastes precious screen space for my application.

Using shortcuts might be a solution in the future. Would be much better if Apple updated their PWA support so that users could select a browser engine instead.

That is really terrible. I don't like the closed nature of Apple's practices anyway, but the way in which they are stifling PWAs is truly abhorrent.

I do feel they'll lose this battle eventually, even if it takes a few years. Cross platform apps without a required compile step or walled garden are almost certainly the end state I expect we'll reach within the next decade (probably sooner).

Keep speaking up, and making this issue clear for others.

It’s just a beta, though, right now… We don’t know if this is getting released or not yet.

Apple confirmed that there are no more full screen web apps. Just bookmarks.

> EU users will be able to continue accessing websites directly from their Home Screen through a bookmark with minimal impact to their functionality.

Well that just sucks.

> I can quickly and easily make an app for myself and my family that works without having to provision their devices or pay a dev license to Apple. I also use it at work for internal apps.

This is exactly why they don't want it. Some will say it's because those are Apple's users and Apple wants to ensure a great user experience and doesn't want unapproved things running on their devices, and others will say it's because it skips Apple's 30% take and their gatekeeping process. My opinion is that both are true, and conveniently both are achieved the same way: by making PWAs enough of an annoyance to both developers and users that they will voluntarily steer away from them. Classic game theory

They would probably ban browsers altogether from iOS, if they could get away with it. Fortunately we are not there yet.

> doesn't want unapproved things running on their devices

> ban web browsers

and this is the point.

Stop playing games.

Allow users to access and easily use the open web with the internet device they bought from you.

Full stop.

I often say that the only reason email is in the form it is today is because it happened before corporate interests took over communication.

If it had been invented today you could only iMessage other iDevice holders. Maybe you would also have had another for-profit middleware company just to deliver messages between Apple and Android devices. Something like a telephone exchange.

In one of the movies about Steve Jobs, he actually does want to make email proprietary and to only be able to send and receive emails on Macs. There was also talk (involving Bill Gates IIRC) about having an electronic stamp (basically a charge for email).

I very much agree, if it were invented today there's no way it would be an open standard. It almost wasn't even back then.

And what do you say to those who point out that Apple has invested significantly in supporting PWAs the last 4 years or so?

To the point that PWA support matches, and in some cases surpasses, Firefox with more on the way as we speak?

Doesn’t that run counter to this theory that Apple is purposefully making PWAs unviable to the benefit of their App Store? Why take away the biggest hurdles that PWAs had on iOS if that was the goal?

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