Self-hosted web push Cloudflare Worker, works on iOS | Hacker News Reader

Self-hosted web push Cloudflare Worker, works on iOS

kukuroo.cc

76 pointssaiday16 comments

Sending push notifications to iOS without relying on a native app has already become a mature option. Last year Apple extended the standard Web Push with Declarative Web Push, which finally makes the whole thing make sense. (It's handled natively by WebKit rather than driven by JavaScript, which improves push reliability and privacy, much like the native push notification model.)

Kukuroo uses Cloudflare Workers so that end devices can subscribe to push notifications and relay push requests to the Worker, which signs and delivers them. I personally found it genuinely useful and full of potential, so I open sourced it: kukuroo.cc

Requirements:

Safari on iOS and macOS only (though seriously, who receives push notifications on macOS?) The web page that receives the notifications has to be added to the Home Screen A Cloudflare account. Push notifications and lightweight serverless functions are a perfect match

The might have fixed some issues but the fact that it is only available for homescreen websites and that the link to add them there is buried in the UI is very stupid imho.

agree ++

> …the link to add them there is buried in the UI…

It's a standard "Send To" option (the "buried" option you refer to?), but PWAs can also use SFAddToHomeScreenActivityItem.

> the fact that it is only available for homescreen websites and that the link to add them there is buried in the UI is very stupid imho

Quite the opposite. They know exactly what they are doing.

Don’t forget that originally Apple was going to make all apps on iOS be web apps. Then they came up with having native apps and the App Store and taking a 20% cut of app sales and IAP. Which made them a boatload of money.

It is only very reluctantly that they allow us to add websites to home screen.

Meanwhile, allowing only websites on home screen to push notifications rather than any random site actually does make sense. I’d probably get rid of my iPhone on the spot if every shit site I visit suddenly started pushing notifications to my phone. And if the sites could, the sites would. Just like websites abuse every other mechanism available to wring as many views and ad impressions as they can out of their visitors.

Refraining from downvoting because I disagree with your last paragraph.

Rest should be mentioned often.

My biggest problem with web push is that you won’t get notifications on iOS anymore, if you haven’t opened the app for a while. A tad bad for some apps.

It sounds like adding a Safari web app to your home screen is a slightly janky delivery mechanism?

Could you use Safari for delivering the notifications even if your default browser is something else?

Seems nice! I use FCM (Firebase) which does this for Android and iOS, which does require some setup, but it's not too bad

unfortunately, Declarative Web Push only supports WebKit, means Android cannot use it.

Mozilla have indicated they are positive on the feature:

https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#declarative-w...

Chromium has a bug filed:

https://issues.chromium.org/issues/382298314

So hopefully this will move forward with other browsers.

I use FCNS or APNS to send notifications to mobile apps, its a bit of hassle but it reaches all platforms.

It'd be great if this solution reaches all browsers on all OS but I can see the potential for spamming , might be why Apple and Android require photo id now.

How is it self-hosted if it runs in a cloudflare worker?

It means you can deploy it in your own Cloudflare account, as opposed to it being a service provided by the developer.

But also, the Cloudflare Workers Runtime is open source, so you could deploy it or your own machines, too, if you want:

https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd

Are there any solutions to encrypting notifications so that the service provider cannot see them?

Declarative Web Push messages are end-to-end encrypted natively, even Apple cannot see the content.

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