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I have been waiting for this for years! Now the only thing that's really missing is an install prompt. I wonder how long we have to wait, the install prompt is

I have been waiting for this for years! Now the only thing that's really missing is an install prompt. I wonder how long we have to wait, the install prompt is crucial, but I view Apples reluctance to implement the install prompt as politically driven. They want to favour their AppStore and make installing Web Apps unnecessarily hard. Edit: It's been three years since I have last dabbled with PWAs. What has been the recent experience?

barnabee 4y ago
There should absolutely never be a prompt to install PWAs. If the site wants to tell me I can install the PWA by adding it to my home screen and remind me how to do so, it's welcome to, but no unwanted popups/prompts.
cientifico 4y ago
My experience is similar. While Apple don't invest in PWA, PWA is doomed from a commercial point of view. It is a really sad situation because the user experience of PWA is match better than installing apps from the store (with higher install rate than native). Twitter is (or was) one of those examples. It took months until I realize that I was using a PWA than a native app.
- kelthuzad 4y ago
  Why do you think PWAs are doomed? Is it because you suspect that Apple will continue to sabotage them regardless of likely fines by regulators?
- threeseed 4y ago
  > Twitter is (or was) one of those examples. It took months until I realize that I was using a PWA than a native app. Something is very wrong if you can't tell the difference. The difference is night and day on iOS. PWA app has significantly lower responsiveness, constant mis-touches on buttons, loading screens for every click etc.
  - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
    > PWA app has significantly lower responsiveness, constant mis-touches on buttons, loading screens for every click etc. That's certainly not inherent to every PWA, e.g. there is no need to have a "loading screen for every click".
    - nvrspyx 4y ago
      Not to mention that the opposite is also true where a large number of "native" apps are really just wrapped up web apps and many suffer these same issues.
      - bobthepanda 4y ago
        Right. Ultimately, it’s a business decision, because paying for 3x the people or 3x the time to implement one feature on web, iOS and android is not something that people like to do, let alone the headache of coordinating feature parity and release timeline with said teams.
      - yamtaddle 4y ago
        Part of the reason I'm not more bothered by Apple making PWAs viable is that they've failed to crack down on apps that don't meet their performance standards, anyway, letting those apps get away with just being terrible-performing, non-native-feeling web-app wrappers. That whole class of trash-tier "app" may as well be a PWA, I guess. I'd rather they kick out every app with an unjustifiably-long launch time or with janky non-native behavior in places where it has no reason to be so, but since they're evidently not gonna do that, may as well have PWAs.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    The twitter web app is such a mess. Only slightly better than "new" Reddit, which is probably one of the single worst offenders in the world of bad SPAs.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  > the user experience of PWA is match better than installing apps from the store (with higher install rate than native). People have A/B tested "click this app store link to install" and "click this to install this webpage as a web-app" and found the latter gets more installs?
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    That’s not really surprising. More clicks = more friction = more people not making it to the end.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Is installing a PWA one tap instead of two (it's two, for iOS native apps), on Android?
      - bobthepanda 4y ago
        To an appstore link, its at least three on ios Once to get to app store Once to click install A double tap to verify after face/touch/passcode on ios (I use iOS.)
        yamtaddle 4y ago
        Ah, forgot about the double-tap to verify. I'd hope PWAs on Android take at least two actions to install (though perhaps not three). One-tap is how you end up with every user having tons of apps installed they never intended to.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > Twitter is (or was) one of those examples. It took months until I realize that I was using a PWA than a native app. I can't believe people keep saying this with a straight face. It's as if they've never seen an proper native app before (any of the third-party clients to Twitter come to mind before they were axed). Or haven't seen actual good fast implementations like the one Twitter actually bought and surprisingly still kinda maintains (see on desktop, https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/)
SllX 4y ago
One other thing is necessary too, but this is iOS specific: I need a way to dump these to my App Library off my Home Screen. I searched out a few PWAs to see what the current experience is like, and even if I wanted to keep any of these around, I don’t want them on my Home Screen per se.
- jaywalk 4y ago
  You can put them on a hidden home screen. It's a pain, but it's the only way to keep the app but not have it on your home screen.
  - SllX 4y ago
    I had a response typed out, but I think I’m missing something. What is a hidden Home Screen on an iPhone? I have a one page Home Screen, after that it’s the App Library.
    - coder543 4y ago
      If you add a second page of apps, go into jiggle mode, tap the page indicator dots at the bottom to enter the overview mode, then uncheck a Home Screen. It will still exist, but it will be hidden.
      - WorldMaker 4y ago
        Focus Modes can also hide/show different Home Screens depending on Focus Mode, which is also one of the handy reasons to use Focus Modes.
        MBCook 4y ago
        I think that’s the only reason this exists, as a side effect of Focus modes. I can’t see Apple adding it purposefully otherwise.
        4y ago
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
What do you mean by the "install prompt"? (Sorry if this obvious, not an iOS user). I thought it was fairly straightforward to add an "add to home screen" overlay to a webpage with javascript.
- coder543 4y ago
  > I thought it was fairly straightforward to add an "add to home screen" overlay to a webpage with javascript. On Android, yes. On iOS, users have to click “share” and “add to Home Screen”, which practically nobody knows how to do, and it presents the user with a rather confusing prompt for them to choose the name of the PWA they’re about to install. The website could tell you to do that, of course, but then it only works in safari at the moment, and it is very clunky. iOS allows websites to show a banner that will help them install the equivalent app from the App Store, but there is no similar functionality for PWAs. Some people speculate that Apple relies on the PWA install process being confusing to help push developers into the App Store.
  - donbrae 4y ago
    You can auto-populate the name field by specifying its value in the manifest.json file, eg https://github.com/donbrae/tripods-web/blob/e2fade06991a83ae79ea88542a95bbf59ee06b9e/dist/manifest.json#L2 https://github.com/donbrae/tripods-web/blob/e2fade06991a83ae...
    - coder543 4y ago
      On my phone, when I click "Add to Home Screen", it immediately focuses the name text field and pops up a keyboard. As a user installing an app, I expect to see the name, the icon, possibly a description, and a big, obvious "install" button. I do not expect to suddenly be presented with a keyboard letting me edit the name of the app. When a user changes the name, it is far more likely to be a mistake than an intentional action, unless the PWA did a phenomenally poor job of naming itself. On Windows, when you install an application, do you expect it to start by highlighting the app shortcut and entering edit mode so you can choose the name of the app? No, that would be bizarre, and it is bizarre here too. Regardless of it being auto-populated, I think being immediately presented with the option to choose the name will inevitably confuse many users. If the user accidentally hits any keys, that will mess up the name... then they have to try to fix it themselves, if they even notice before they hit the "add" button. That just doesn't seem like a great user experience. Talking about the "add" button, it is not called "install", unfortunately. The "add" button by itself may confuse users into wondering if they clicked bookmark by mistake. In fact, the interface is nearly identical to the bookmark interface in Safari, except that the bookmark interface uses the word "save" instead of "add", and the bookmark interface shows you which folder you're saving into. How clear and simple! The "add" button is also a small button in the top right, which is completely different from how the "GET" button with a vivid blue background is presented in the App Store. Renaming and restyling the button to match the one in the App Store would make the experience more consistent for the user. None of this matters to technical users like us either way, but making PWAs more accessible to all users requires making the process as easy as possible, smoothing out weird rough edges like this. The option to edit the name would make more sense under the Settings app or maybe an additional "Edit" option in "jiggle mode" on the home screen, if it should even exist at all. I can't edit the name of other apps on my phone. From a technical perspective, someone might ask "why can't I edit those names too?" But, it should be consistent either way, in my opinion. Those are my opinions on the current interface, anyways. I don't think Apple has meaningfully changed it for over a decade, and if they have decided to care about PWAs, they really should polish this interface up.
yamtaddle 4y ago
Ugh, no. It's bad enough they can pop "THIS SITE IS BETTER IN THE APP" shit. The last thing we need are more ways for a site to shove things in front of me to make my day worse. Keep it user-driven.
- lxgr 4y ago
  I mean, given that we already have "GO GET OUR APP NOW OR ELSE" prompts, would PWA prompts make things any worse? And very often I'd actually prefer a PWA, e.g. if I know that I'll be using a given site/service exactly once. Common example: A flight or train ride with a carrier I know I won't be using again anytime soon, but still would like to get notifications relevant to my trip.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Yes, there'd be way more of them, because the barrier to entry (and justifiable motivation for needing an "app" in the first place) would be even lower.
    - kitsunesoba 4y ago
      I agree, every random site will almost certainly be vying for notification screen space via PWA install, which will make these banners practically omnipresent on the commercial web. It wouldn't surprise me if the trend we've been seeing in iOS where notifications are deprioritized continues in iOS 17, including some kind of mechanism that deprioritizes notifications from the spammiest apps and sites unless the user has explicitly marked them as important.
      - yamtaddle 4y ago
        Uuuuugh the last thing I want is notifications becoming like email, where it's so spammy and impossible to deal with that automated tools have to start categorizing spam and affecting message visibility, and then important messages start to get lost in the shuffle.
Turing_Machine 4y ago
> I view Apples reluctance to implement the install prompt as politically driven I agree. See also: the way you can't directly open an HTML document from Files (you essentially get a blank screen, even if all the JS and CSS is located in the HTML file).
WorldMaker 4y ago
Rather than a separate PWA "Add to Home" prompt, it would be nice if they added simple PWA support to the App Store directly. Microsoft's app store supports developers just dropping a URL to their web app manifest as pretty much the only thing needed to add a listing to the Store. (It also supports providing previous package IDs to migrate older apps to PWAs. Microsoft's Bing crawler will also sometimes pick up web app manifests and add basic listings in the app store when the manifest has enough information to do so.) Android app stores are in various stages of supporting similar things. It would great if Apple similarly supported PWAs as first-class citizens in the App Store. It would also make a lot of sense: it would still favor the App Store as the "primary" or "best" way to install apps, and users would keep a lot of familiar experiences in choosing to "install" apps (much more familiar than Share > Add to Home, as other comments around here point out). Apple can even still try to curate the listings to keep them looking nice and staying informative (and whatever quality insurance checks they like to run). The users don't need to know or care that an "app" in the App Store is a PWA or not. Same with all the normal "Install Our App" and "Find this App in the App Store" links and prompts and modals (and "paywalls") those can/should all be the same experience whether the app itself is powered by Swift (or anything else) or powered by a PWA. Users that install PWAs via an App Store think they are still sommewhat locked into that app store's moat because they still think of that app as originating from that App Store. It's something of a win-win for Apple, I feel. Not as a replacement for a general option like Share > Add to Home, because there will always be PWAs with no interest in submitting things to App Stores (and users will always want nice home screen bookmarks even for non-PWAs), but as a way to unify the install experiences for PWAs that do care about install metrics and app-like branding the best thing Apple could do (both for users and themselves) would likely be to allow developers to just submit their web app manifest URLs as the only "application code" in an App Store listing.
xfalcox 4y ago
It's been great. Web Share, Web Share Target, Notification Inline replies, Contacts API, are useful in the app I work on.
- nevernude 4y ago
  Unfortunately a number of those APIs are still not available on iOS and have seen little to no traction[1] 1. https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194593 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194593
tuxone 4y ago
I wonder when you people will stop thinking with your marketing/growhacking/SEO/spam brain and start being on the user side. If you want low value visitors just go and buy ad clicks, thanks!
- izelnakri 4y ago
  I strongly disagree that what he is asking is user hostile, just like asking microphone or camera permissions aren't user hostile. You also didn't need to lecture anyone like that on hacker news, thanks!
  - tuxone 4y ago
    What they are asking would be used as an annoying tool against the user in the same way today sites ask for user location or push notification (on other OSs). Websites are not randomly asking for mic or camera because that would be creepy and visitors would just run away. I am not lecturing, I am giving my feedback on the matter, like everyone else here. If your product is good, users will save your site in their home, don’t worry about that.
- LeanderK 4y ago
  lol, this was a project I did for a friendly event free of charge. I choose PWA because it's only useful for three days and nobody is going to install an app for this, you want it working right away. I was getting good results but the experience was just way smoother on android. A good prompt/banner/whatever that the app is installable felt essential when viewing the users behaviour because it's "drive-by" usage.
holoduke 4y ago
Actually not bad. We are converting all our native apps to either webapps (still available in the store) and as a PWA. Performance was always an issue, but nowadays we are convenient that performance is good enough. Developping in web is soo much easier, cheaper and much much faster.
latexr 4y ago
> I view Apples reluctance to implement the install prompt as politically driven. They want to favour their AppStore and make installing Web Apps unnecessarily hard. I keep seeing this touted as fact, yet no one has ever provided any evidence. I have the feeling everyone who says it is just mad at the feature not being there and they ascribe to Apple the most damming justification they can come up with. Apple is greedy, especially under Tim Cook, but that doesn’t mean every decision is primarily motivated by it. Sometimes the people at Apple truly believe something is the right choice for the majority of users. Maybe you’ve been lucky to have never seen a relative’s device full of spammy web push notifications they don’t know how to turn off, but that is not rare. You can find reports of it among the other comments.

barnabee 4y ago

There should absolutely never be a prompt to install PWAs. If the site wants to tell me I can install the PWA by adding it to my home screen and remind me how to do so, it's welcome to, but no unwanted popups/prompts.

cientifico 4y ago

My experience is similar. While Apple don't invest in PWA, PWA is doomed from a commercial point of view. It is a really sad situation because the user experience of PWA is match better than installing apps from the store (with higher install rate than native). Twitter is (or was) one of those examples. It took months until I realize that I was using a PWA than a native app.

kelthuzad 4y ago
Why do you think PWAs are doomed? Is it because you suspect that Apple will continue to sabotage them regardless of likely fines by regulators?
threeseed 4y ago
> Twitter is (or was) one of those examples. It took months until I realize that I was using a PWA than a native app. Something is very wrong if you can't tell the difference. The difference is night and day on iOS. PWA app has significantly lower responsiveness, constant mis-touches on buttons, loading screens for every click etc.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  > PWA app has significantly lower responsiveness, constant mis-touches on buttons, loading screens for every click etc. That's certainly not inherent to every PWA, e.g. there is no need to have a "loading screen for every click".
  - nvrspyx 4y ago
    Not to mention that the opposite is also true where a large number of "native" apps are really just wrapped up web apps and many suffer these same issues.
    - bobthepanda 4y ago
      Right. Ultimately, it’s a business decision, because paying for 3x the people or 3x the time to implement one feature on web, iOS and android is not something that people like to do, let alone the headache of coordinating feature parity and release timeline with said teams.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Part of the reason I'm not more bothered by Apple making PWAs viable is that they've failed to crack down on apps that don't meet their performance standards, anyway, letting those apps get away with just being terrible-performing, non-native-feeling web-app wrappers. That whole class of trash-tier "app" may as well be a PWA, I guess. I'd rather they kick out every app with an unjustifiably-long launch time or with janky non-native behavior in places where it has no reason to be so, but since they're evidently not gonna do that, may as well have PWAs.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  The twitter web app is such a mess. Only slightly better than "new" Reddit, which is probably one of the single worst offenders in the world of bad SPAs.
yamtaddle 4y ago
> the user experience of PWA is match better than installing apps from the store (with higher install rate than native). People have A/B tested "click this app store link to install" and "click this to install this webpage as a web-app" and found the latter gets more installs?
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  That’s not really surprising. More clicks = more friction = more people not making it to the end.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Is installing a PWA one tap instead of two (it's two, for iOS native apps), on Android?
    - bobthepanda 4y ago
      To an appstore link, its at least three on ios Once to get to app store Once to click install A double tap to verify after face/touch/passcode on ios (I use iOS.)
      - yamtaddle 4y ago
        Ah, forgot about the double-tap to verify. I'd hope PWAs on Android take at least two actions to install (though perhaps not three). One-tap is how you end up with every user having tons of apps installed they never intended to.
dmitriid 4y ago
> Twitter is (or was) one of those examples. It took months until I realize that I was using a PWA than a native app. I can't believe people keep saying this with a straight face. It's as if they've never seen an proper native app before (any of the third-party clients to Twitter come to mind before they were axed). Or haven't seen actual good fast implementations like the one Twitter actually bought and surprisingly still kinda maintains (see on desktop, https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/)

SllX 4y ago

One other thing is necessary too, but this is iOS specific: I need a way to dump these to my App Library off my Home Screen. I searched out a few PWAs to see what the current experience is like, and even if I wanted to keep any of these around, I don’t want them on my Home Screen per se.

jaywalk 4y ago
You can put them on a hidden home screen. It's a pain, but it's the only way to keep the app but not have it on your home screen.
- SllX 4y ago
  I had a response typed out, but I think I’m missing something. What is a hidden Home Screen on an iPhone? I have a one page Home Screen, after that it’s the App Library.
  - coder543 4y ago
    If you add a second page of apps, go into jiggle mode, tap the page indicator dots at the bottom to enter the overview mode, then uncheck a Home Screen. It will still exist, but it will be hidden.
    - WorldMaker 4y ago
      Focus Modes can also hide/show different Home Screens depending on Focus Mode, which is also one of the handy reasons to use Focus Modes.
      - MBCook 4y ago
        I think that’s the only reason this exists, as a side effect of Focus modes. I can’t see Apple adding it purposefully otherwise.
        4y ago

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

What do you mean by the "install prompt"? (Sorry if this obvious, not an iOS user). I thought it was fairly straightforward to add an "add to home screen" overlay to a webpage with javascript.

coder543 4y ago
> I thought it was fairly straightforward to add an "add to home screen" overlay to a webpage with javascript. On Android, yes. On iOS, users have to click “share” and “add to Home Screen”, which practically nobody knows how to do, and it presents the user with a rather confusing prompt for them to choose the name of the PWA they’re about to install. The website could tell you to do that, of course, but then it only works in safari at the moment, and it is very clunky. iOS allows websites to show a banner that will help them install the equivalent app from the App Store, but there is no similar functionality for PWAs. Some people speculate that Apple relies on the PWA install process being confusing to help push developers into the App Store.
- donbrae 4y ago
  You can auto-populate the name field by specifying its value in the manifest.json file, eg https://github.com/donbrae/tripods-web/blob/e2fade06991a83ae79ea88542a95bbf59ee06b9e/dist/manifest.json#L2 https://github.com/donbrae/tripods-web/blob/e2fade06991a83ae...
  - coder543 4y ago
    On my phone, when I click "Add to Home Screen", it immediately focuses the name text field and pops up a keyboard. As a user installing an app, I expect to see the name, the icon, possibly a description, and a big, obvious "install" button. I do not expect to suddenly be presented with a keyboard letting me edit the name of the app. When a user changes the name, it is far more likely to be a mistake than an intentional action, unless the PWA did a phenomenally poor job of naming itself. On Windows, when you install an application, do you expect it to start by highlighting the app shortcut and entering edit mode so you can choose the name of the app? No, that would be bizarre, and it is bizarre here too. Regardless of it being auto-populated, I think being immediately presented with the option to choose the name will inevitably confuse many users. If the user accidentally hits any keys, that will mess up the name... then they have to try to fix it themselves, if they even notice before they hit the "add" button. That just doesn't seem like a great user experience. Talking about the "add" button, it is not called "install", unfortunately. The "add" button by itself may confuse users into wondering if they clicked bookmark by mistake. In fact, the interface is nearly identical to the bookmark interface in Safari, except that the bookmark interface uses the word "save" instead of "add", and the bookmark interface shows you which folder you're saving into. How clear and simple! The "add" button is also a small button in the top right, which is completely different from how the "GET" button with a vivid blue background is presented in the App Store. Renaming and restyling the button to match the one in the App Store would make the experience more consistent for the user. None of this matters to technical users like us either way, but making PWAs more accessible to all users requires making the process as easy as possible, smoothing out weird rough edges like this. The option to edit the name would make more sense under the Settings app or maybe an additional "Edit" option in "jiggle mode" on the home screen, if it should even exist at all. I can't edit the name of other apps on my phone. From a technical perspective, someone might ask "why can't I edit those names too?" But, it should be consistent either way, in my opinion. Those are my opinions on the current interface, anyways. I don't think Apple has meaningfully changed it for over a decade, and if they have decided to care about PWAs, they really should polish this interface up.

yamtaddle 4y ago

Ugh, no. It's bad enough they can pop "THIS SITE IS BETTER IN THE APP" shit. The last thing we need are more ways for a site to shove things in front of me to make my day worse. Keep it user-driven.

lxgr 4y ago
I mean, given that we already have "GO GET OUR APP NOW OR ELSE" prompts, would PWA prompts make things any worse? And very often I'd actually prefer a PWA, e.g. if I know that I'll be using a given site/service exactly once. Common example: A flight or train ride with a carrier I know I won't be using again anytime soon, but still would like to get notifications relevant to my trip.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Yes, there'd be way more of them, because the barrier to entry (and justifiable motivation for needing an "app" in the first place) would be even lower.
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    I agree, every random site will almost certainly be vying for notification screen space via PWA install, which will make these banners practically omnipresent on the commercial web. It wouldn't surprise me if the trend we've been seeing in iOS where notifications are deprioritized continues in iOS 17, including some kind of mechanism that deprioritizes notifications from the spammiest apps and sites unless the user has explicitly marked them as important.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Uuuuugh the last thing I want is notifications becoming like email, where it's so spammy and impossible to deal with that automated tools have to start categorizing spam and affecting message visibility, and then important messages start to get lost in the shuffle.

Turing_Machine 4y ago

> I view Apples reluctance to implement the install prompt as politically driven I agree. See also: the way you can't directly open an HTML document from Files (you essentially get a blank screen, even if all the JS and CSS is located in the HTML file).

WorldMaker 4y ago

Rather than a separate PWA "Add to Home" prompt, it would be nice if they added simple PWA support to the App Store directly. Microsoft's app store supports developers just dropping a URL to their web app manifest as pretty much the only thing needed to add a listing to the Store. (It also supports providing previous package IDs to migrate older apps to PWAs. Microsoft's Bing crawler will also sometimes pick up web app manifests and add basic listings in the app store when the manifest has enough information to do so.) Android app stores are in various stages of supporting similar things. It would great if Apple similarly supported PWAs as first-class citizens in the App Store. It would also make a lot of sense: it would still favor the App Store as the "primary" or "best" way to install apps, and users would keep a lot of familiar experiences in choosing to "install" apps (much more familiar than Share > Add to Home, as other comments around here point out). Apple can even still try to curate the listings to keep them looking nice and staying informative (and whatever quality insurance checks they like to run). The users don't need to know or care that an "app" in the App Store is a PWA or not. Same with all the normal "Install Our App" and "Find this App in the App Store" links and prompts and modals (and "paywalls") those can/should all be the same experience whether the app itself is powered by Swift (or anything else) or powered by a PWA. Users that install PWAs via an App Store think they are still sommewhat locked into that app store's moat because they still think of that app as originating from that App Store. It's something of a win-win for Apple, I feel. Not as a replacement for a general option like Share > Add to Home, because there will always be PWAs with no interest in submitting things to App Stores (and users will always want nice home screen bookmarks even for non-PWAs), but as a way to unify the install experiences for PWAs that do care about install metrics and app-like branding the best thing Apple could do (both for users and themselves) would likely be to allow developers to just submit their web app manifest URLs as the only "application code" in an App Store listing.

xfalcox 4y ago

It's been great. Web Share, Web Share Target, Notification Inline replies, Contacts API, are useful in the app I work on.

nevernude 4y ago
Unfortunately a number of those APIs are still not available on iOS and have seen little to no traction[1] 1. https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194593 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194593

tuxone 4y ago

I wonder when you people will stop thinking with your marketing/growhacking/SEO/spam brain and start being on the user side. If you want low value visitors just go and buy ad clicks, thanks!

izelnakri 4y ago
I strongly disagree that what he is asking is user hostile, just like asking microphone or camera permissions aren't user hostile. You also didn't need to lecture anyone like that on hacker news, thanks!
- tuxone 4y ago
  What they are asking would be used as an annoying tool against the user in the same way today sites ask for user location or push notification (on other OSs). Websites are not randomly asking for mic or camera because that would be creepy and visitors would just run away. I am not lecturing, I am giving my feedback on the matter, like everyone else here. If your product is good, users will save your site in their home, don’t worry about that.
LeanderK 4y ago
lol, this was a project I did for a friendly event free of charge. I choose PWA because it's only useful for three days and nobody is going to install an app for this, you want it working right away. I was getting good results but the experience was just way smoother on android. A good prompt/banner/whatever that the app is installable felt essential when viewing the users behaviour because it's "drive-by" usage.

holoduke 4y ago

Actually not bad. We are converting all our native apps to either webapps (still available in the store) and as a PWA. Performance was always an issue, but nowadays we are convenient that performance is good enough. Developping in web is soo much easier, cheaper and much much faster.

latexr 4y ago

> I view Apples reluctance to implement the install prompt as politically driven. They want to favour their AppStore and make installing Web Apps unnecessarily hard. I keep seeing this touted as fact, yet no one has ever provided any evidence. I have the feeling everyone who says it is just mad at the feature not being there and they ascribe to Apple the most damming justification they can come up with. Apple is greedy, especially under Tim Cook, but that doesn’t mean every decision is primarily motivated by it. Sometimes the people at Apple truly believe something is the right choice for the majority of users. Maybe you’ve been lucky to have never seen a relative’s device full of spammy web push notifications they don’t know how to turn off, but that is not rare. You can find reports of it among the other comments.