7 ms·

PWAs are DOA until Apple adds proper support and they’ll never do that, since they’ll take a huge chunk of Appstore profits out of Apple’s hands.

toadkicker 6y ago
Ironically Apple is also the ones who kicked off the entire PWA race because of the lack of an SDK when the iPhone launched. The messaging then was "build for the web, that is better than native" and now its "native or gtfo" and web apps are not preferred. The last 5 years that I've built web versions of apps first, the client told me "look the web app is great, hard to tell its a web app honestly. Except when I want to..." and you all know the rest of the conversation from here. Firefox, I love you, but you're bringing me down. We need a powerful, semi-native, offline capable architecture for the web. I don't care about the PWA spec, it's quite messy handling the implementation of one. But I do think it has always been the vision that the web is accessible regardless of physical connection to it. As long as I can remember in this industry we've swung back and forth between "thin" and "thick" clients as if one way is the right way. Microservices over monoliths, etc. It's all the same symptom that naturally we don't want to grapple complexity. This announcement is yet another entry in the cannon of thin vs thick. It's a hard problem and any PM who only cares about optimizing time spent will say everything they can once they've zeroed in on the perceived waste.
- z3t4 6y ago
  Also ironic is that Apple dont recommend adding web apps to the app store. Eg. wrapping web sites in an app.
- blueblisters 6y ago
  Apple's love for native apps began - if I remember correctly - with the popularity of jailbroken devices and third party app stores like Cydia that could unleash the full potential of iPhone 1. Until then, Jobs was stubbornly against giving developers access to the native ecosystem and preferred that they develop web applications. I wonder if browsers would be full-fledged VMs by now if we had continued along the web application trajectory.
  - zapzupnz 6y ago
    This seems like a misconception. It's clear that Apple was brewing the SDK for developer adoption and that their crowing about web apps was a stop-gap measure. Are we really imagining Apple brought out a public SDK, set up the app approval system, certification, all that stuff, updated Xcode to support it all on a whim in under a year (starting with iPhoneOS 2) just because Cydia existed No way, José. Apple are good but even they can't pull all that out of their ass overnight. Web was clearly a stop-gap because the SDK wasn't ready and iPhoneOS was, at the time, an outlier in purposefully not supporting Java ME apps.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    Apple's love for native apps began - if I remember correctly - with the popularity of jailbroken devices and third party app stores like Cydia that could unleash the full potential of iPhone 1 As someone who developed a couple of the first round of web apps for the original iPhone, while waiting for the first SDK, I can tell you that this it not true. To someone evaluating it from the outside using a list of release dates, it may seem logical. But an SDK isn't invented overnight.
    - blueblisters 6y ago
      Hmm you are right I came to that conclusion largely from Apple's original messaging and the change in stance around the time jailbreaking was getting popular. > As someone who developed a couple of the first round of web apps for the original iPhone, while waiting for the first SDK, I can tell you that this it not true. Were you given early access to the SDK before release?
- lucasverra 6y ago
  Apple is helping Amazon et Google to publish their gamestore's on PWA [0]. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/25/21455343/amazon-luna-apple-app-store-rules-cloud-gaming-streaming-google-nvidia https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/25/21455343/amazon-luna-appl...
whereistimbo 6y ago
But at the same time Apple was kicking out templated apps claiming these apps could be built using web instead [0], although Apple retracted it later [1]. [0]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/08/apples-widened-ban-on-templated-apps-is-wiping-small-businesses-from-the-app-store/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/08/apples-widened-ban-on-temp... [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/20/apple-revises-its-controversial-guidelines-on-template-based-apps/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/20/apple-revises-its-controve...
z3t4 6y ago
The problem right now is that you need to go outside the sandbox in order to make a web app feel first class. Chrome has solved it with a modal/dialog that ask users to add the app to the home screen, but I think the modal/dialog in Chrome is too spammy. It's better if users can do it manually, but its currently hidden too deep in the Safari UI, and Im not even sure you can reach it in mobile safari UI.
- lloeki 6y ago
  > Im not even sure you can reach it in mobile safari UI Isn’t that covered by Share -> Add to Home Screen?
  - LeanderK 6y ago
    yes that's it. I would just build a custom prompt that says "tap on the share icon" and then tap "Add to Home Screen".
irrational 6y ago
Apple killed Flash by not allowing it to run on iPhones and iPads. It seems to me that Apple is doing the same thing with the features usually associated with PWAs. It is interesting that Apple devices are far from having a monopoly in the mobile market. Yet their influence is so great that they can kill platforms just by not supporting them.
- pojntfx 6y ago
  True. Apple is currently the biggest threat to the free and open web as (they even force their own browser engine on their users and ban anyone who tries to use anything else). The EU should step in and force them, just like they forced Microsoft in the past, to allow multiple browser engines on their devices.
  - zapzupnz 6y ago
    There's a huge difference between the EU vs Microsoft antitrust investigations involving Internet Explorer. This was at a time when Microsoft was still the dominant player in the market and IE had a stranglehold on the browser market. By contrast, Apple doesn't have a monopoly on the mobile device market, the browser market is dominated by Google's Chrome, and the majority share of browsers use Chrome's Blink engine. 'PWA' is a Google-invented term to describe technologies already implemented in their own browser; none of it constitutes a single standard unto itself. Apple not fully implementing Google's standard, made not for the benefit of the open web but to make ChromeOS a little more functional than a glorified web browser, is only a threat to those who've forgotten that coding for one browser is what got us stuck in the code-only-for-IE mindset and halted progress for browsers for about a decade. Apple isn't the biggest threat to the free and open web. Google is. Everybody's using Google's browser, based around Google's own standards designed to force people to stay using Google, to access Google's search which displays Google's ads above Google's curated AMP results.
    - cageface 6y ago
      iOS safari users have made up at least 50% the traffic of the last few sites I’ve launched. In the US at least they effectively have veto power on new browser features.
nojito 6y ago
App Clips are way better for end users and developers than PWAs https://developer.apple.com/app-clips/ https://developer.apple.com/app-clips/ It also protects against advertising and tracking penetration that Google's PWAs encourage.
Turing_Machine 6y ago
Support for PWAs is much better in recent versions of iOS than it was before. It looks like Apple is moving toward kicking all the "websites in a native wrapper" stuff out of the App Store, so PWA may well be the future.
bob1029 6y ago
Web-based applications on iOS are already very dangerous to the app store when developed properly. Apple would have to intentionally sabotage safari in horrific ways to get the cat back into the bag on this one. PWA is just a tiny distraction in the grand scheme of things, but it is a good place to have this conversation regardless.

toadkicker 6y ago

Ironically Apple is also the ones who kicked off the entire PWA race because of the lack of an SDK when the iPhone launched. The messaging then was "build for the web, that is better than native" and now its "native or gtfo" and web apps are not preferred. The last 5 years that I've built web versions of apps first, the client told me "look the web app is great, hard to tell its a web app honestly. Except when I want to..." and you all know the rest of the conversation from here. Firefox, I love you, but you're bringing me down. We need a powerful, semi-native, offline capable architecture for the web. I don't care about the PWA spec, it's quite messy handling the implementation of one. But I do think it has always been the vision that the web is accessible regardless of physical connection to it. As long as I can remember in this industry we've swung back and forth between "thin" and "thick" clients as if one way is the right way. Microservices over monoliths, etc. It's all the same symptom that naturally we don't want to grapple complexity. This announcement is yet another entry in the cannon of thin vs thick. It's a hard problem and any PM who only cares about optimizing time spent will say everything they can once they've zeroed in on the perceived waste.

z3t4 6y ago
Also ironic is that Apple dont recommend adding web apps to the app store. Eg. wrapping web sites in an app.
blueblisters 6y ago
Apple's love for native apps began - if I remember correctly - with the popularity of jailbroken devices and third party app stores like Cydia that could unleash the full potential of iPhone 1. Until then, Jobs was stubbornly against giving developers access to the native ecosystem and preferred that they develop web applications. I wonder if browsers would be full-fledged VMs by now if we had continued along the web application trajectory.
- zapzupnz 6y ago
  This seems like a misconception. It's clear that Apple was brewing the SDK for developer adoption and that their crowing about web apps was a stop-gap measure. Are we really imagining Apple brought out a public SDK, set up the app approval system, certification, all that stuff, updated Xcode to support it all on a whim in under a year (starting with iPhoneOS 2) just because Cydia existed No way, José. Apple are good but even they can't pull all that out of their ass overnight. Web was clearly a stop-gap because the SDK wasn't ready and iPhoneOS was, at the time, an outlier in purposefully not supporting Java ME apps.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  Apple's love for native apps began - if I remember correctly - with the popularity of jailbroken devices and third party app stores like Cydia that could unleash the full potential of iPhone 1 As someone who developed a couple of the first round of web apps for the original iPhone, while waiting for the first SDK, I can tell you that this it not true. To someone evaluating it from the outside using a list of release dates, it may seem logical. But an SDK isn't invented overnight.
  - blueblisters 6y ago
    Hmm you are right I came to that conclusion largely from Apple's original messaging and the change in stance around the time jailbreaking was getting popular. > As someone who developed a couple of the first round of web apps for the original iPhone, while waiting for the first SDK, I can tell you that this it not true. Were you given early access to the SDK before release?
lucasverra 6y ago
Apple is helping Amazon et Google to publish their gamestore's on PWA [0]. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/25/21455343/amazon-luna-apple-app-store-rules-cloud-gaming-streaming-google-nvidia https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/25/21455343/amazon-luna-appl...

whereistimbo 6y ago

But at the same time Apple was kicking out templated apps claiming these apps could be built using web instead [0], although Apple retracted it later [1]. [0]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/08/apples-widened-ban-on-templated-apps-is-wiping-small-businesses-from-the-app-store/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/08/apples-widened-ban-on-temp... [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/20/apple-revises-its-controversial-guidelines-on-template-based-apps/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/20/apple-revises-its-controve...

z3t4 6y ago

The problem right now is that you need to go outside the sandbox in order to make a web app feel first class. Chrome has solved it with a modal/dialog that ask users to add the app to the home screen, but I think the modal/dialog in Chrome is too spammy. It's better if users can do it manually, but its currently hidden too deep in the Safari UI, and Im not even sure you can reach it in mobile safari UI.

lloeki 6y ago
> Im not even sure you can reach it in mobile safari UI Isn’t that covered by Share -> Add to Home Screen?
- LeanderK 6y ago
  yes that's it. I would just build a custom prompt that says "tap on the share icon" and then tap "Add to Home Screen".

irrational 6y ago

Apple killed Flash by not allowing it to run on iPhones and iPads. It seems to me that Apple is doing the same thing with the features usually associated with PWAs. It is interesting that Apple devices are far from having a monopoly in the mobile market. Yet their influence is so great that they can kill platforms just by not supporting them.

pojntfx 6y ago
True. Apple is currently the biggest threat to the free and open web as (they even force their own browser engine on their users and ban anyone who tries to use anything else). The EU should step in and force them, just like they forced Microsoft in the past, to allow multiple browser engines on their devices.
- zapzupnz 6y ago
  There's a huge difference between the EU vs Microsoft antitrust investigations involving Internet Explorer. This was at a time when Microsoft was still the dominant player in the market and IE had a stranglehold on the browser market. By contrast, Apple doesn't have a monopoly on the mobile device market, the browser market is dominated by Google's Chrome, and the majority share of browsers use Chrome's Blink engine. 'PWA' is a Google-invented term to describe technologies already implemented in their own browser; none of it constitutes a single standard unto itself. Apple not fully implementing Google's standard, made not for the benefit of the open web but to make ChromeOS a little more functional than a glorified web browser, is only a threat to those who've forgotten that coding for one browser is what got us stuck in the code-only-for-IE mindset and halted progress for browsers for about a decade. Apple isn't the biggest threat to the free and open web. Google is. Everybody's using Google's browser, based around Google's own standards designed to force people to stay using Google, to access Google's search which displays Google's ads above Google's curated AMP results.
  - cageface 6y ago
    iOS safari users have made up at least 50% the traffic of the last few sites I’ve launched. In the US at least they effectively have veto power on new browser features.

nojito 6y ago

App Clips are way better for end users and developers than PWAs https://developer.apple.com/app-clips/ https://developer.apple.com/app-clips/ It also protects against advertising and tracking penetration that Google's PWAs encourage.

Turing_Machine 6y ago

Support for PWAs is much better in recent versions of iOS than it was before. It looks like Apple is moving toward kicking all the "websites in a native wrapper" stuff out of the App Store, so PWA may well be the future.

bob1029 6y ago

Web-based applications on iOS are already very dangerous to the app store when developed properly. Apple would have to intentionally sabotage safari in horrific ways to get the cat back into the bag on this one. PWA is just a tiny distraction in the grand scheme of things, but it is a good place to have this conversation regardless.