Apple’s long resistance to allowing ‘web push’ on iOS has held back PWA adoption. And they’ve obviously never admitted it, but this policy protected the hegemony of the App Store, and therefore Apple’s control over the whole ecosystem. The absence of web push on arguably the world’s most important web browser (iOS Safari) was a feature for them. It constrained PWAs to niche, toy use cases - if you wanted to make a real app with notifications (like most apps) and you wanted it to be available to iPhone owners, you had no choice but to follow Apple’s technical and content restrictions and generally play to their fiddle and be very polite to them.
So with that incentive structure in place, I didn’t hold out much hope for the situation ever changing except possibly through some anti-trust thing.
But now it’s happening. Why? What does Apple get out of this move in return for the loss of control it is likely to mean for them? Can anyone shed any light? Perhaps it’s about staying a couple of steps ahead of antitrust suits they can see coming down the line?
The only caveat I can see is it requires a $100/year developer certificate. That doesn’t sound like a major caveat to me. That cost is nothing if it means you can build one app that runs everywhere.
I guess maybe Apple could still revoke your certificate if they don’t like what you’re doing with your web app, ie hamstring your webapp by taking away your push notification ability. But I’m guessing (hoping) this would be a very rare hostile ‘intervention’ compared to the common experience today of every app update being subjected to review by Apple and possibly rejected for arcane reasons.