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Comment by nguyenkien | Hacker News Reader

On android PWA home shortcut create by one browser, will use that browser, regardless of default browser. I don't see why Apple couldn't do the same.

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Apple provided theirs reasoning on this (security issues due to how iOS is currently written...) when they initially stated they would be removing them and said the work was'nt worth the tiny base of users who use it.

Only technical reasons. When PWA’s were introduced in iOS 11, they were built with the assumption of WebKit as a privileged process. A re-arch is definitely doable, just a big expense for little return. And probably not feasible in just a year, can’t imagine it would be a top priority against all of the other work.

Myself, I'll use PWA to mean "promoted web app" - since it is closer in this context, and 99% of the market gets "progressive" wrong anyway.

I believe that third party browser engines will have the same privileges as WebKit (in the EU, on iOS only).

PWAs do not run directly on WebKit; they run on Web.app which is a WebKit-based application. Think something like Cordova, provided by the OS, but which does not require each PWA to be a separate wrapped app listed in the App Store.

There is a recently-added interface to create one of these Web.app PWAs by third party browsers, as well as to create home screen bookmarks (which I believe open in the default browser not the running browser, but I am not a browser implementer).

There is not however not a way for a browser vendor to ship their own Web.app-equivalent using their browser engine.

Simulating some of the behaviors of a PWA on iOS outside of Web.app is also difficult. For instance - the multi-window functionality of iPadOS is not present, so a fullscreen web app would block usage of other tabs.

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