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

andregarzia.com

691–700 of 927 posts

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

#691
OP here, I just posted an update section there with some extra information that I decided to clarify upon after interacting with people here. Thanks a lot for the responses, this has been quite great. I wish more people that are affected by this or that have opinions about it would write more posts.

There is no change without applying pressure at Apple. If this is important, we must speak about it, all of us. And yes, I understand that some people feel that this is not important for them, that is OK, we have different values and understandings, but if you have an opinion about this, please go out and post to your blog, dev.to, medium, whatever, but post.

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

#692

I ported Polar ( https://getpolarized.io/ ) over to a PWA about a year ago. It's kind of a nightmare due to both Google and Apple messing things up. PWAs could be an amazing platform but both companies are really messing it up. Apple is trying to kill them by giving plausible explanations as to why they can't have PWAs. Security this, blah blah blah. There's no reason they can't have PWAs work well in Safari other th…

> ... Consumers are another problem. ...

You blame Apple, Google and your consumers, instead of just making native apps. Why?

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

#694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that OP is saying it would be preferable to have blink-everywhere than to have a deliberately-crippled Apple web browser with all other choices banned.

I'm the OP and I am a Mozilla volunteer. I prefer a web with many engines, I want it to have WebKit, Blink, Gecko and more.

Agreed. There is no choice with IOS: you choose the same WebKit that they've chosen, or Safari. One engine and version, or one browser using that one engine.

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

#695
post #577

I ported Polar ( https://getpolarized.io/ ) over to a PWA about a year ago. It's kind of a nightmare due to both Google and Apple messing things up. PWAs could be an amazing platform but both companies are really messing it up. Apple is trying to kill them by giving plausible explanations as to why they can't have PWAs. Security this, blah blah blah. There's no reason they can't have PWAs work well in Safari other th…

> There's no reason they can't have PWAs work well in Safari other than they want you to port your app to the App Store and get locked into their native APIs. Is it possible they also want you to port your app to the App Store to prevent an explosion of garbage and malware that could happen if PWAs really took off?

There is absolutely no reason that PWAs can't be sandboxed like native apps, or even more aggressively. In fact, native apps are more likely to be spyware, as they can collect much more information from the user than a browser-based app can.

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

#696
Since when was software freedom synonymous with we should all want to use PWAs?

I’d be happy if Spotify gave me an API key and essentially went away except for a monthly bill.

But software has to be a product the masses get first to get made in our world.

I’m glad some folks are having their itch scratched but free streams are more than enough and I can wrap them for consumption as I choose.

Once again building your life around importing someone else’s priorities turns into an exercise of despair from not learning how reality doesn’t stand still no matter how hard you hope it will this time.

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

#697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this entire statement is wrong in 2020. There are literally OSes now that are just browsers.

The fact that that is possible does not change the role of the web browser in the modern computing experience. If you want to build an entire VM that runs in Electron, be my guest, but that's orthogonal to the issue of how Safari should handle storage by default.

The fact that that is possible does not change the role of the web browser in the modern computing experience.

But why shouldn't new possibilities change the modern computing experience or the role of browsers within it? Millions of users are benefitting from new capabilities of modern browsers, even if they don't know the details any more than they know what goes into any other software they use. Why is local storage of data, or the idea of a PWA more generally, special in this respect?

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

#700

I ported Polar ( https://getpolarized.io/ ) over to a PWA about a year ago. It's kind of a nightmare due to both Google and Apple messing things up. PWAs could be an amazing platform but both companies are really messing it up. Apple is trying to kill them by giving plausible explanations as to why they can't have PWAs. Security this, blah blah blah. There's no reason they can't have PWAs work well in Safari other th…

Makes sense, they want you to create native apps so they can collect their rent, and also dictate what is in, what is out, and control searching of apps.
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