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Regarding people not wanting push notifications, I would refer you back to this comment from a couple years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643185 h

Regarding people not wanting push notifications, I would refer you back to this comment from a couple years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643185 There is a small but significant group of people that I've only found on HN who seem to claim to just not use notifications at all on their smartphones, but this is not how most people operate. Regarding your question, there are definitely still important areas such as Background Sync: https://caniuse.com/background-sync https://caniuse.com/background-sync If you try to send a message in WhatsApp, Signal, or whatever, but you were on the elevator and your phone was offline at that moment, it would be a pretty poor user experience if the app didn't send the message as soon as your phone was connected again, even if you had switched away. This is currently problematic for PWAs on iOS. Similarly, if you get a notification, apps will often get a small allocation of background time to fetch content related to the notification so that it is cached when the user clicks on the notification. Apple wouldn't offer this to native apps if they didn't think it was useful. Here's an article talking about the benefits of the feature: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/12/background-sync https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/12/background... "Web apps" in this context should just be thought of as "apps". The fact that they're effectively bookmarks added to your home screen and operate without the user interface of Safari is just an implementation detail. I'm not talking about spam blogs trying to send you notifications. If you were required to "install" a PWA to your home screen before it could prompt for these other permissions, that would be perfectly fine, and a great way to avoid getting spammed for requests to send you spam notifications from random websites. Safari has fallen way behind other browsers on lots of standards, not just PWAs, so it's not terribly surprising that they aren't keeping up with PWA-related standards either, but it is disappointing. And, of course, Apple still doesn't allow third party browser engines to fill in the gaps.

Grustaf 5y ago
> "Web apps" in this context should just be thought of as "apps" Why? Native apps aren't webapps, and do have access to push notifications. > There is a small but significant group of people that I've only found on HN who seem to claim to just not use notifications at all on their smartphones, but this is not how most people operate. Why do you keep conflating webapps and apps? I certainly use notifications in native apps, but the thought never even crossed my mind to enable them in webapps. I click "No" faster than lightning when websites prompt me on the mac, so why would I want it on my phone.
- coder543 5y ago
  I’m not conflating them in the way you think I am. You seem to be unaware of what a PWA actually is. As an example, if you go to twitter.com on your iPhone in Safari, you can click the share button, click Add to Home Screen, and you will get a very app-like Twitter experience when you launch what you just added to the Home Screen. Because it is an app. Literally the only reason I’ve seen that most people would be dissatisfied with the Twitter PWA is because it lacks notifications. In my experience, it is often faster than the native app and does fewer dumb things, like clicking on a YouTube link actually opens in the YouTube app, instead of the way the native Twitter app tries to keep you in a modal web view. Regardless of Apple marketing, PWAs run in a more secure environment than native apps, because Safari is used to dealing with untrusted code on every single page you load. Apple leaned too much on their insufficient app review process instead of native app isolation technologies for too long. They have fortunately corrected course over the last couple of years… but native apps still present higher risk. (PWAs also run completely isolated from the regular Safari browsing session, so you will naturally need to sign into Twitter again even if you were already signed in within Safari, but then it stays signed in exactly like the native app.)

Grustaf 5y ago

> "Web apps" in this context should just be thought of as "apps" Why? Native apps aren't webapps, and do have access to push notifications. > There is a small but significant group of people that I've only found on HN who seem to claim to just not use notifications at all on their smartphones, but this is not how most people operate. Why do you keep conflating webapps and apps? I certainly use notifications in native apps, but the thought never even crossed my mind to enable them in webapps. I click "No" faster than lightning when websites prompt me on the mac, so why would I want it on my phone.

coder543 5y ago
I’m not conflating them in the way you think I am. You seem to be unaware of what a PWA actually is. As an example, if you go to twitter.com on your iPhone in Safari, you can click the share button, click Add to Home Screen, and you will get a very app-like Twitter experience when you launch what you just added to the Home Screen. Because it is an app. Literally the only reason I’ve seen that most people would be dissatisfied with the Twitter PWA is because it lacks notifications. In my experience, it is often faster than the native app and does fewer dumb things, like clicking on a YouTube link actually opens in the YouTube app, instead of the way the native Twitter app tries to keep you in a modal web view. Regardless of Apple marketing, PWAs run in a more secure environment than native apps, because Safari is used to dealing with untrusted code on every single page you load. Apple leaned too much on their insufficient app review process instead of native app isolation technologies for too long. They have fortunately corrected course over the last couple of years… but native apps still present higher risk. (PWAs also run completely isolated from the regular Safari browsing session, so you will naturally need to sign into Twitter again even if you were already signed in within Safari, but then it stays signed in exactly like the native app.)