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Comment by perons | Hacker News Reader

One comment that I haven't seen yet and that puts PWA for Games in jeopardy: the maximum caching allowed for Safari PWA's (thus the whole iOS ecossystem) is only 50mb. Most mid-core / hardcore mobile games are bigger than that after downloading remote assets when the app loads for the first time, and this means a player of a mid-core PWA game would have to redownload a good chunk of the assets everytime the game loads.

I could be mistaken though, but I tried looking for how PWA's work with caching and it is a whole layer of uncertainties that depends on which browser/OS/ecosystem you are in, and if the user clears it's browser cache. In the end, it seems like PWA will only work reliably when the PWA is super light, and doesn't need a lot of caching, so for gaming that would mean only lightweight, casual and hypercasual games.

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The 50mb limit no longer exists, it's much higher now https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=198133#c15

Safari will delete your cached data if your app goes unused for a little while though. Native apps may do the same thing though... at least on Android I get notifications about it deleting cached data for native apps I haven't used recently.

That's nice, thanks for correcting me! Although it's quite a nuisance that most PWA info I looked for before posting had the old 50mb (mis)information.

If the app is added to the home screen, then it is exempted from having it's data wiped after 7 days without usage.

https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention/#intelligent-tracking...

And good docs on storage quotas on different browsers.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Storage_API...

I think there's also benefits of using persistent storage

Safari has always hampered PWAs, and probably for the reason that they want you to use the appstore instead ($$$).

Is Android dramatically better for PWAs?

It’s a bit better but I’ve still not found any PWAs that I’d want to use over a native Android app, if only because they’re near-universally rough, quirky, and generally unpleasant in ways that modern Jetpack Compose apps aren’t.

There are fewer walls, yes.

Push notifications from PWAs are another area that is unnecessarily limited on iOS. They only work if the user has added your PWA to their home screen and Safari doesn't support the install prompts available in Chrome and similar.

So your users will need to go out of their way to add the PWA to their home screen and then they can receive silent push notifications because Apple says sound and vibrations are only allowed for native apps.

It came out in the Epic trial that 90% of App Store revenue comes from games. Those aren’t going to be web apps anyway for monetization reasons.

If PWAs are so bad on iOS and great on Android, why do companies bother with writing Android apps, web apps for computers and iOS apps instead of just telling Android users to use the web apps?

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