Service workers aren’t a magic “run forever in the background” technology. I’m fairly sure PWAs can’t run in the background at all on iOS or Android, except fo

Service workers aren’t a magic “run forever in the background” technology. I’m fairly sure PWAs can’t run in the background at all on iOS or Android, except for possibly a brief moment after the PWA receives a notification, and the service worker doesn’t have access to much of anything during that interval. If anyone can link to something that demonstrates otherwise, okay, but I have checked on this in the past, and I don’t think so. Native apps have been caught with their hand in the metaphorical cookie jar over and over again. The App Store review process is largely ineffective. Apple apparently didn’t even realize that apps were doing sketchy things with the clipboard until it became a major headline[0], and this is only the tip of the iceberg of “things App Store review didn’t catch”. Native apps continue to find ways to bypass sandboxing that the OS applies. Browsers naturally take a much more adversarial posture against the code they’re running, so the sandboxing is far stronger. Apple has spent at least a decade marketing[1] to convince people the App Store is synonymous with safety. Given how detached this seems to be from reality, the simplest conclusion seems to be that they do this because they really want their 30% cut. The marketing campaign seems to be working too well. In reality, the browser seems to be substantially safer, although nothing is perfect. [0]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/tiktok-and-53-other-ios-apps-still-snoop-your-sensitive-clipboard-data/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/tiktok-and-53-other-... [1]: https://apple.com/app-store/ https://apple.com/app-store/ “The apps you love. From a place you can trust. For over a decade, the App Store has proved to be a safe and trusted place to discover and download apps.”