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We need to protest against how Apple cripples PWAs on iPhones. Sure some apps might be more efficient as native apps, but let me choose.
by blowski 5y ago
We need to protest against how Apple cripples PWAs on iPhones. Sure some apps might be more efficient as native apps, but let me choose.
- woutr_be 5y agoI don't really follow the world of PWAs, what is Apple doing to cripple them on iOS?
- alfonsodev 5y agothis is 2020[1] state but you can make an idea, the most important one in my opinion is the friction that exists to add the app to the app list of your phone, you can't do it programatically is the user who has to go through the menus of iOS, it makes imposible to have a nice Web App Store and that's the biggest barrier for mass adoption in my opinion. - [1] https://simplabs.com/blog/2020/06/10/the-state-of-pwa-support-on-mobile-and-desktop-in-2020/ https://simplabs.com/blog/2020/06/10/the-state-of-pwa-suppor...
- The_rationalist 5y agoThe thing is, Ionic has none of those issues
- dbetteridge 5y agoCan only use Apples JS engine on iOS and they limit things like push notifications and background workers. Makes it difficult to get the full 'App' experience people expect
- fakename11 5y agoOP probably wants site to be to send notifications even though Firefox’s research on the topic has shown that they are 99+ percent spam. I find it very annoying when I visit a site and there's an annoying pop-up asking for notifications (even though chrome and firefox block most automatically). The Mozilla study showed that sites already try and show 100s of billion notifications to users a year "Notification prompts are very unpopular. On Release, about 99% of notification prompts go unaccepted, with 48% being actively denied by the user." https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/11/04/restricting-notification-permission-prompts-in-firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/11/04/restricti... I also would bet that most acceptance clicks by users were accidental.
- 2Gkashmiri 5y agoyes. go and check a regular friends' chrome browser. notifications left and right, constant irritant of "breaking news" and "check this out" from essentially spam sites. i am grateful of preventing notifications by default
- k__ 5y agoNobody cares about notifications. It's all about the shitty browser storage on iOS.
- mavhc 5y agoPretty sure I want to know when I have a new message
- realusername 5y agoYeah if Safari wouldn't break localStorage or indexDB every other version, that would work better already and a nice start.
- tehbeard 5y agoThere is nothing stopping Firefox from saying x,y and z APIs are considered dangerous and web app only, and gating them behind the PWA install prompt. I want Apple to do this as well to put pressure on google to fix their shit with letting these run rampant on the web.
- pygy_ 5y agoNotifications from Web sites are spam. Web apps that can be made resident on your phone home screen are another story, where notifications may be legitimate (e.g. chat apps).
- blowski 5y agoNotifications from websites that I don't want to receive are spam. Perhaps it's a webapp where I communicate with friends, and want to be notified.
- 5y ago
- rubyist5eva 5y agoApple deliberately cripples like, like notifications and workers - so that you have to wrap your PWA in an "app" for those features and distribute it on the App Store - with all the "fun" stuff that comes along with that.
- agust 5y agoTheir Safari browser, running on WebKit, is full of bugs and lagging behind in features such as Push Notifications, Install prompts for Web Apps, and many many others. It makes it impossible to have quality Web Apps running through Safari. This wouldn't be a problem if users could use other browsers that are not that buggy and have the features needed to build native-like app experience. But Apple is banning any other browser from using their own engine, they are all forced to use the buggy and lagging behind WebKit. Firefox, Edge, Chrome, etc on iOS are just skins around WebKit. So there is basically no browser competition on iOS, and this is how Apple prevent web apps from competing with native apps.
- phaer 5y agoIsn't that case somehow similar to how Microsoft used to bundle IE with Windows? iOS isn't a monopoly such as Windows was, but you could use another browser engine on Windows and you can't on iOS. Shouldn't that at least worry antitrust legislators in the EU and/or the US?
- julianlam 5y agoNo, not at all. In Windows you can install any other browser you want (even if it ships with IE default). On iOS, ALL browsers are forced to used Safari's rendering engine. It would be like installing Firefox and it uses Trident in the background.
- IggleSniggle 5y agoThe poster you are responding to is saying the same thing, but also referencing the huge judgement that Microsoft faced for pre-installing Internet Explorer / making it the default browser. They’re saying that while the situation isn’t completely analogous, that what Apple is doing is far more egregious than what Microsoft already faced massive judgement for doing.
- phaer 5y agoExactly, thanks for clarifying - I've been afk :)
- adam12 5y agoOne thing that really bothers me is that there is no install prompt for a PWA on iOS. Users have to be told to find the install button which is buried in a menu.
- donmcronald 5y agoI would also like to have it, but I can see how it could become a spam issue. Every garbage site on the planet would start pushing PWAs to get on a users home screen. It would be the same thing if notifications were reserved for PWA installs only and not in the browser. That's one area where the app stores are pretty good. If you open the app store, you want to install apps. The same can't be said for a website. I think the only way it would work really well is if the add to home screen / install button was prominent in the browser chrome and sites could trigger some effect if they can be installed as a PWA. For example, change from an inactive button to an active button.
- adam12 5y agoI'm not sure how it could be abused. The api doesn't allow the developer initiate the install prompt.
- nyuszika7h 5y agoThey can just trigger the prompt when you scroll the website or something, that counts as a user gesture.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- marcodiego 5y agoThat's interesting. AFAIK, Steve Jobs didn't want installable app on the iphone. The phone should come with a few features and everything external should come from the web. He changed his mind after android included installable apps.
- criddell 5y agoSteve Jobs thought any feature that Apple products didn’t have was stupid and then once they added that feature, it was the best thing ever and their version was the best version of that feature.
- gigglesupstairs 5y agoAnd may be because Cydia happened?
- tannhaeuser 5y agoWe also need to protest against the ongoing effort to misuse the web for fscking web apps nobody wants, to the detriment of the original purpose of the web as a hypertext delivery mechanism.
- tyingq 5y agoProbably hard to unring that bell. It even seems like many "native apps" are now mostly just webviews with a very small amount of native orchestration, etc.
- moonchrome 5y ago>fscking web apps nobody wants I want webapps. I don't want to install everything and the browser sandbox is tightest available. Taking my apps everywhere without having to install them is really nice.
- remus 5y ago> ...ongoing effort to misuse the web for fscking web apps nobody wants... You mean things like google maps, gmail and vimeo? They seem pretty popular to me, and significantly improved by the fact that almost anyone with a web browser can access them.
- agust 5y agoYou must be living in a parallel universe. On desktop pretty much the entire app industry as shifted to the web, including recently the very well-known and used software that are Office 365 and Photoshop. Most people are perfectly happy with web apps. Easily reachable and discoverable through web browsers, not using space in disk, performing quite well for most of them. They are great for companies too, reducing dramatically development and maintenance cost, with only one codebase for all devices instead of one per platform, allowing to develop apps that would have never existed otherwise. Actually nobody cares about "the original purpose of the web". The web has included technologies to build apps very early by the way, back in the 90s.
- ohCh6zos 5y agoAlmost everything around PWA's is an anti-feature that makes the browser more opaque.
- pjmlp 5y agoThat is what keeps the Web of fully turning into ChromeOS for all practical matters.
- criddell 5y agoI support Apple because I think they are sticking up for their users. If they had great support for PWAs a lot of companies and developers would go that route and there would be no native app option. You have a choice. If you want to run PWAs, get an Android phone.
- gherkinnn 5y agoI am an Apple user and they're not sticking up for me. They're sticking me. > If they had great support for PWAs a lot of companies and developers would go that route and there would be no native app option. No. Apple doesn't want to let go of the app store model and the money it gives em. Every other problem one could conceive of is solvable.
- criddell 5y ago> Every other problem one could conceive of is solvable. I think the biggest problem with PWAs is the resource usage. A well written PWA will use a lot more battery, network, CPU, and memory than a well written native app. That's not solvable. PWAs are a lowest common denominator solution. They are good for developers but bad for users.
- blowski 5y ago> A well written PWA will use a lot more battery, network, CPU, and memory than a well written native app. That's not solvable. What complete nonsense. It's hardly baked into the rules of the universe. Of course Apple could figure this out at a technical level, it just doesn't work for their profit margins. Besides, it should be my choice and not Apple's whether I want to install an app that uses more CPU. > They are good for developers but bad for users. There are entirely valid use cases where the expense and hassle of making native apps prevents any app existing at all. Small businesses building apps for their staff, individuals building apps for themselves or families, small groups of friends.
- criddell 5y ago