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Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

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Re: Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

#71

Post by masklinn »

pluma wrote: post #4

I think push notifications and offline support are the real killer features that Apple currently doesn't support. It's kind of funny as a web developer because for the longest time Apple seemed to be the one pushing the mobile web forward but now that web apps are reaching for feature parity with native, Apple's initial momentum seems to be ancient history. It seems Apple still thinks of the mobile web as a content d…

> I think push notifications and offline support are the real killer features that Apple currently doesn't support.

Technically Apple does support offline via the older manifests mechanism (and "Add to Home Screen" which invokes it remains prominent in the safari share sheet) though it's a lousy (and pretty buggy) experience.

Interestingly they don't support any sort of web notifications on iOS despite having added local notifications ( https://www.w3.org/TR/notifications/) in macOS 10.8 and remote Safari Push Notifications (built on APNS) in macOS 10.9.

Re: Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

#72

Post by interpol_p »

I hate using web apps. On desktop, mobile, wherever. The author's list of things they want supported by Mobile Safari is just aggravating:

> Here are a list of things you still can’t do with mobile safari due to Apple’s refusal to support them:

>

> Create an app loading screen

> Use push notifications

> Add offline support

> Create an initial app UI to load instantly

> Prompt installation to the home screen through browser-guided dialog

Why do I want these things, as a user. App loading screens?

I love the web. I love hyperlinks, text and images. The web of connections that lead you to information. Everything in that list is detrimental to a good experience on the web.

I don't want push notifications, I barely enable them for native apps. And it bugs the hell out of me when every second website in desktop Safari prompts to send me push notifications. No. Why would I want this on mobile?

Same thing with the home screen. I love the fact that the address bar in my web browser is my history, my reminders, my bookmarks, my open tabs. I start typing what I want and I'm there. Finding native apps on my home screen is only just getting to the same place with Spotlight, why would I want to make the web worse by sticking icons for pages on my home screen?

And browser-guided dialogs to put more icons on my home screen? Seriously?

This author's post is a great argument against web apps on mobile.

Re: Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

#73

Post by royal_ts »

rimliu wrote: post #46
kartan wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is Papa Pear: https://king.com/game/papapear The HTML5 version is compiled from the same source that the App that goes to the Apple App Store ( https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/papa-pear-saga/id572542612?m... ). What's so different? It is literally the same code base (minus some platform specific code).

I am talking about possibilities provided by iOS SDK and what is provided by web stack. It is amazing that React Native does not even have something UINavigationControll-ish. UIKit alone gives stuff which is lightyears ahead of the web. Even some more basic stuff: how easy it is to add accessibility to PWAs? Localization?

Most Frontend-Frameworks do have Localization-features so that's kind of easy to do. But other features like Bluetooth are nowhere to be seen (Blink Browser can do this - but it's far far away from a standard)

Re: Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

#74

Post by GordonS »

christiangenco wrote: post #65

I think a lot of commenters here are missing the point and getting distracted by push notifications (who wants a website spamming them with notifications?) and loading screens (hardly a feature). Apple supporting PWA (Progressive Web Apps) is hugely important because it enables a future where web apps can natively support browser, Mac/Windows/Linux desktop, and mobile iPhone/Android/Windows native mobile with a singl…

> Right now, the only way for me to accomplish that on iOS is to make a native app. This means I had to learn an entirely new technology stack

It's not the only way - you can create a hybrid app with something like Ionic (obviously this is compiled to a native app at build time, but you never touch a line of XCode yourself).

One of the big selling points of hybrid apps is that you can use your existing Javascript/Typescript skills to create apps that look and feel like native apps.

Re: Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

#75

Post by ivanbakel »

>Is this just capitalism? Looking out for their own well being? No. Apple is filthy, filthy rich.

Naive much? People and corporations don't tend to stop collecting wealth - that is, after all, how they became so filthy, filthy rich in the first place.

Re: Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

#76

Post by egeozcan »

rimliu wrote: post #64
egeozcan wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vibe you have is wrong. It's not about learning a new language. Most web developers are comfortable in many languages. Plase stop attacking a straw-man. Not many web developers say stuff like "omg these new things are web scale" or "oh javascript is everything I need, I hate everything else". Yeah the author didn't want to learn a new language. Which is not an insane decision at the very beginning of a project. T…

> Most web developers are comfortable in many languages. Citation needed. Especially the "most" part. I've been web developer for 10 years when iPhone came out. I liked what I saw, so when SDK came out I've learned Objective-C. Then I learned Swift. And because I know both sides all this feature parity talk really makes me sad about ignorant people not even willing to learn. "Walled-garden" has long ago became though…

You know that the need for citation goes both ways and anecdotal evidence isn't a real reference, right? Web developers know at least JS, HTML & CSS. Too many know Ruby, Python and/or PHP. Significant amount of them know C#/Java/Go or something similar. Then there is Typescript, all those compile-to-js languages and so on. I've never ever seen a web developer who could only program in JS. That would be very ridiculous. I personally can't count how many languages I worked and had to work with. My list includes ColdFusion. I'm very comfortable with at least 5 languages and 6 platforms.

> I am thankful that Apple does not allow to litter it with some JS scraps.

Oh, so much for being objective. References and all.

> All this cross-platform talk is just being cheap, being lazy or both.

Are you even serious? You really blame engineers/developers coming up with trade-offs for being cheap and/or lazy?

> And I would not be surprised that maintaining cross-platform monstrosity eats away any cost-savings pretty quickly.

No it doesn't. I'm a developer since much more than 10 years. I guess that's enough of a reference :)

Re: Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

#77

Post by ashark »

ino wrote: post #32

All browsers still suck at basic functionality. Here's a quick short list of things that developers still have to write because the current implementations are broken, buggy, inconsistent or absent: - Date pickers. - Image upload [1]. - Autocomplete and datalist. - Range pickers. - Upload time remaining without javascript. - Number min/max/step, use up/down keys to increment/decrement. - Form elements that are unable…

In an ideal world I think browsers would have removed most non-click-related JS events (including timers) and AJAX calls, but provided way better native form elements. Also kept improving frames rather than letting them stagnate and die. The web'd be far better if they'd gone that direction rather than the full (terrible) app delivery platform.

Re: Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

#79

Post by Dude2018 »

christiangenco wrote: post #65

I think a lot of commenters here are missing the point and getting distracted by push notifications (who wants a website spamming them with notifications?) and loading screens (hardly a feature). Apple supporting PWA (Progressive Web Apps) is hugely important because it enables a future where web apps can natively support browser, Mac/Windows/Linux desktop, and mobile iPhone/Android/Windows native mobile with a singl…

Screw new features, using JavaScript and HTML/CSS for apps must die.

Re: Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

#80

Post by MaxLeiter »

aedron wrote: post #54

Since the article did not go into details, and many of the points seem nonsensical, can someone elaborate? Why can I not "Create an app loading screen" without service workers? Why can I not "Create an initial app UI to load instantly"? Seems these are trivially possible with regular Javascript, but maybe I'm misunderstanding? Similarly, "Use push notifications", "Add offline support" and "Prompt installation to the…

Offline support and push notifications require service workers (or some other API that doesn't exist yet[1])

And for prompting installation, I think the author wants it to appear native.

(Apple does have their own notification API but it requires an account).

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