I've waited years for push notifications to come to iOS Safari. This is wonderful news.
Same. I'm beyond excited. I thought we would never get them since Apple wants their App Store cut. Today is a good day
Push Notifications, WebXR, and better PWA support coming to iOS
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Re: Push Notifications, WebXR, and better PWA support coming to iOS
#32Funny enough, apps were supposed to be just for Apple. The original conception is that 3rd party tools, games, etc. for the iPhone would just be webapps. ( https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-... , etc.) A few adjustments to the model and here we are with lots of native code and big money... but still, folks requesting updates to the the browser to support more app-ish functionality. I'm glad;…
Given how quickly the App Store was introduced (just one year later) I’m betting that they never had the intention to go web-app only. They probably only needed extra time to figure out the experience for both developers and users (from native APIs to permission model to monetization)
Actually, incorrect. According to court documents released from lawsuits, Apple in fact did not plan for the App Store initially, just like Steve Jobs said on stage. It was not until a few months after the iPhone was released that some internal employees convinced Steve to let it go ahead and release an SDK. I can't find the tweet containing a copy of it, but the actual email where Steve gave the SDK a go is on the public record.
Re: Push Notifications, WebXR, and better PWA support coming to iOS
#33I'm excited to see support for Web Push. I realize that most people associate it with spammy sites asking for permission to send you notifications you don't want, but I think it hasn't really been given a chance because it lacks iOS support. Some things that it enables: - Low-friction asynchronous turn-based games (think “Words with Friends” but you don't have to install an app) - Single-purpose alerts (like CamelCam…
I just wish that “web applications” were more clearly distinguished from regular web sites. I hate that a regular website I may tap on a search result would ever want to send me notifications. But, if a site that is clearly more of an “application” to me (like an online spreadsheet or chat app, etc) wants to send me notifications, that could be a useful feature. If there were a more clear delineation between the two,…
I would find this type of differentiation useful as well. “Plain” sites are generally faster to skim through for what I’m looking for, (no gauntlet of spinning loading wheels and dialogs or JS gumming up functions like Find in Page) so it would be nice to be able to prioritize those in search results.
One way to do this would be for the crawler to compare the content of JS-enabled and JS-disabled states and if they differ dramatically, the web destination gets tossed in the “web app” bucket.
Re: Push Notifications, WebXR, and better PWA support coming to iOS
#34TLDR: there's broken/non-functioning push notification support in iOS 15 beta... and its disabled by default.
Nothing to be excited about yet.
Re: Push Notifications, WebXR, and better PWA support coming to iOS
#35I really can’t see many use cases for web notifications apart from annoying sites trying to bug me. So I’m happy Apple haven’t supported it.
100% of "use" of it I've seen on the desktop has been spammy sites no sane person would ever want to receive notifications from bugging me to enable them because I made the mistake of clicking them in search results, and my wife accidentally enabling notifications from random sites, getting spammed, and having no idea how they've managed to do that or how to disable it. That's why I've hoped Apple'd never support them on iOS, and wished they'd never supported it on desktop.
As someone posted elsewhere in the thread, I hope Apple restricts requests to sites you've added as an "app" already. And I hope they find a way to keep sites from being able to tell you've "installed" them, so actually-useful sites or ones that I have no choice but to use (work, kids' school stuff) can't refuse to operate until I do that (I dunno, maybe they already do, I never "install" sites)
Re: Push Notifications, WebXR, and better PWA support coming to iOS
#36I'm excited to see support for Web Push. I realize that most people associate it with spammy sites asking for permission to send you notifications you don't want, but I think it hasn't really been given a chance because it lacks iOS support. Some things that it enables: - Low-friction asynchronous turn-based games (think “Words with Friends” but you don't have to install an app) - Single-purpose alerts (like CamelCam…
So, once this is integrated clicking a link will have the following experience: 1) Tracking preferences overlay that will have a wall of text with "Accept all" and "Customise" buttons that would not be clickable the first few tries. 2) Then you will have a modal that asks for your e-mail address so you can receive the newsletters from the website that you are trying to understand what is this all about. 3) And now yo…
> Wouldn't be great to have a notification once the new Wordle of the day arrives?
Nitpick, but for that specific example, not really, since it's always at local midnight according to your device's time setting (for certain values of "arrive", since all past and future wordles are always present in the page source).
[EDIT] Oh and:
> Besides the questionable practices of Apple/Google, there's barely any reason to have browsers with PWA capabilities. I would love it if the web browsers had JS off by default and load JS only when the user explicitly requests it.
I think the biting of the apple, if you will, for the web, was allowing Javascript to ever initiate requests on its own, or modify e.g. post request content or URLs pre-flight without user review and explicit OK. It's fucking absurd that clicking a link to a site means it gets to track your mouse movements and send them, live, to some server somewhere, and that disabling that means wrecking most of the web and making it a pain to use. No transmitting data without explicit user action and review, I say.
Re: Push Notifications, WebXR, and better PWA support coming to iOS
#37I really hope the WebXR API stuff will come with support for VR headsets in Safari on desktop, and that whatever Apple's rumored VR headset end up being will also support it. WebXR has been great for my app at work, but we're basically locked into the Quest 2 right now because Mozilla dropped the ball on WebXR support. Oculus is the only one doing significant VR work with WebXR in their Oculus Browser, which is a Chr…
There is also no mention yet on Apple support for glTF file types which is important to keeping an open web based XR ecosystem.
glTF can be rendered by the libraries, I think native glTF support only matters if you want to display it isolated and natively in the browser with nothing else, like an image. Which is not really a use case for VR.
Re: Push Notifications, WebXR, and better PWA support coming to iOS
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given how quickly the App Store was introduced (just one year later) I’m betting that they never had the intention to go web-app only. They probably only needed extra time to figure out the experience for both developers and users (from native APIs to permission model to monetization)
Actually, incorrect. According to court documents released from lawsuits, Apple in fact did not plan for the App Store initially, just like Steve Jobs said on stage. It was not until a few months after the iPhone was released that some internal employees convinced Steve to let it go ahead and release an SDK. I can't find the tweet containing a copy of it, but the actual email where Steve gave the SDK a go is on the p…
Re: Push Notifications, WebXR, and better PWA support coming to iOS
#39So we can hack AR in JS, in the browser, with a reasonable support in both Android and iOS ecosystems?
Re: Push Notifications, WebXR, and better PWA support coming to iOS
#40TLDR: there's broken/non-functioning push notification support in iOS 15 beta... and its disabled by default. Nothing to be excited about yet.
Yes, but it is a major change of direction or a major accident for them to even put this in a beta build if they still have no intention of adding it.