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Remember that when the iPhone was launched there was no app store. All you could do was 'install' a web app. Now we have progressive web apps with full offlin
by alex_young 5y ago
Remember that when the iPhone was launched there was no app store. All you could do was 'install' a web app.
Now we have progressive web apps with full offline functionality, but installing them is a nightmare.
You have to dig through the share menu from Safari (tough luck if you use another browser) to install one, and Apple removes it after some time limit.
Maybe a half measure would be to make that process less restrictive and allow companies to directly distribute software to their users again...
- ec109685 5y agoPush notifications also don't work with web apps. Totally hamstrung platform.
- alex_young 5y agoIsn’t that an os issue? Push notifications work on desktop websites…
- skynet-9000 5y agoIt is absolutely an OS issue, but neither mobile OS has any incentive at all to do anything to make PWA's actually work. In fact, they have every incentive to make sure they don't work. You can see this in their constant regressions in areas that only actually matter to PWA's. I will say this: Google has been a lot more fair and open to PWA's and related tech (like WebRTC) than Apple. Apple absolutely hates the idea of any web app that might survive outside of the app store. In fact, for a very, very long time you couldn't even upload a photo on Craigslist with a standard HTML "Browse" button, because "IOS doesn't have a filesystem." It was a conscious decision to not allow the camera to be accessed except from within an IOS app.