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Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

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Re: Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

#491

Post by untog »

alkonaut wrote: post #434

Did PWA's take off? What are some famous/big PWA's now? I can't remember ever "installing" anything in a browser as an app, or even being asked if I wanted to do it. Am I misunderstanding what they are?

There's a chicken/egg issue here. Apple's support for progressive web apps has been subpar, so it's difficult to justify the extra effort in making a PWA when a major platform doesn't fully support it. Which, in turn, means people turn around and say "why should Apple support PWAs? No-one uses them!"

Re: Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

#492

Post by oblio »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #391
Animats wrote: post #385

What are private client-side PWAs anyway? Good question. The definition of a "progressive web app" is vague. What they seem to mean is a web page which, once you visit it, is cached locally, and thereafter runs locally. The web page accesses various servers, not necessarily ones from the same domain as the web page. Persistent state, if any, is stored locally. The page gets its own icon on the home screen somehow, so…

> Apple apparently dislikes this because they don't get to force people to use their store This is part of the motivation. The other is advertisers using persistent local storage to track users [1]. [1] https://clearcode.cc/blog/alternatives-to-cookie-tracking/

Do they block native apps that track users?

Re: Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

#493

Post by iameli »

redindian75 wrote: post #375
soapdog wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even web apps that you add to your home screen are subjected to this.

"Web applications added to the home screen are not part of Safari and thus have their own counter of days of use."[1] From WebKit: [1] https://webkit.org/blog/10218/full-third-party-cookie-blocki... A Note On Web Applications Added to the Home Screen As mentioned, the seven-day cap on script-writable storage is gated on after seven days of Safari use without user interaction on the site.” That is the case in Safari.…

> Web applications added to the home screen are not part of Safari and thus have their own counter of days of use. [...] We do not expect the first-party in such a web application to have its website data deleted.

I don't get it. Which of these statements is correct?

1. "Web applications added to the home screen are not part of Safari and thus have their own counter of days of use. Of course, that counter doesn't do anything. It just sits there, counting, for no particular reason. We just love counting things!"

2. "We do not expect the first-party in such a web application to have its website data deleted. Except, of course, if they don't use the web application for seven days. In that case, that data will be _extremely_ deleted! Really just wiped from the face of the earth."

Re: Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

#494

Post by jfb »

ajford wrote: post #484
mulmen wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand this. If you want to make something local, make an app and distribute through the app store, that's what it is for. A web app on the other hand is connected by definition, no? Apple forcing local apps to distribute through the app store is a feature .

No, it's a grab for money. Releasing an iOS app requires Apple hardware, X-code, and an Apple developer license which is $100/yr. Where as developing a PWA can be done on any hardware, and would be natively cross-platform. An offline PWA does not require an active connection, and in fact is the one of the reasons behind the idea of developing a PWA instead of a general webapp or website. All other browsers allow the…

I promise you that Apple does not give a shit about the revenue from the developer program.

Re: Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

#496

Post by woodson »

alkonaut wrote: post #434

Did PWA's take off? What are some famous/big PWA's now? I can't remember ever "installing" anything in a browser as an app, or even being asked if I wanted to do it. Am I misunderstanding what they are?

Twitter’s web client is a PWA

Re: Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

#497

Post by arendtio »

lucasmontano wrote: post #459
theturtletalks wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://appsco.pe/ has popular PWAs. They don't need to be installed, they just look and work like an app on the browser.

they really “look” like an app

The look depends on how much effort the developer invests. If you take Bootstrap, the resulting PWA looks like a website. If you take Framework7 the resulting PWA looks more like a native App (including animations and the like).

Re: Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

#498

Post by alkonaut »

soapdog wrote: post #455
alkonaut wrote: post #434

Did PWA's take off? What are some famous/big PWA's now? I can't remember ever "installing" anything in a browser as an app, or even being asked if I wanted to do it. Am I misunderstanding what they are?

I'm the OP, I use a lot of PWAs. My main machine is a Surface Pro X and I don't have native apps (as in native aarch64 binaries) for many of the things I'd like to use. So, I'm using PWAs for Instagram, Twitter, Kindle, Pinafore (mastodon client), Spotify, and some of my own. I was developing a feed reader that was supposed to be a client-side-only PWA but that's tricky.

What is spotify pwa offering that is an improvement over their regular web app? Is it offline streaming (downloaded playlists)?

Re: Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

#499

Post by eslaught »

snazz wrote: post #466
swsieber wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A feature for who? Not for users - now there's one less avenue for developers to get them something they want. Not for developers - now they have to jump through additional hoops to make something that works cross platform. Who exactly does this benefit?

Users want to be able to log in and see their data from any device. If the whole idea is that there is no server that the data is stored on, then you can't have a sync function, can you? Do any of you have an example of a good offline-only PWA that will be affected by this?

The whole point is that those PWAs probably never got built in the first place because the foundations were always shaky at best. It's a chilling effect.

But if you look at native apps, especially ones I use on desktop OSes, they're dominated (at least in my usage) by offline-first or offline-only apps---and for me, this is a feature, not a bug. This doesn't have to mean they don't have sync, by the way, it just means that's separate from the main functionality of the app.

A perfect example of this is Dropbox: it syncs to your local disk by default. It's easy to forget how valuable this is until you go camping (or similar) and suddenly you realize you forgot to star that one directory you care about. Now your mobile phone is useless, but your laptop works no problem. And due to this being factored out into a separate app, all my files now work regardless of file type (I don't need separate offline support in every app I use, since that's the default).

Re: Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

#500

Post by osrec »

fastball wrote: post #481
brlewis wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A web app on the other hand is connected by definition, no? No, it just has to run in a browser.

Well it needs to be downloaded from the internet at least the first time, so it's intrinsically going to be less secure than an app that you can guarantee never connects to the internet.

Your app needs to be downloaded the first time too. In fact, a downloaded app can run riot on your filesystem. A web app runs in the "cage" of the browser, and is arguably more secure and explicit about permissions it requests.
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