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How to Use Web Apps on iPhone and iPad

JuicyGoomba said:
What's with the nonsensical fearmongering here? Are you okay there Tim? Still raging about them lower profits?

PWAs are great, and they're one of the main reasons Chromebooks became such a threat to both Apple and Microsoft when it comes to the Notebook space. Install Spotify on a Chromebook, or even the PWA from any Chrome browser, and you'll be hard pressed to notice the difference between native and PWA.

Saying that PWAs are a security risk is absolutely hilarious. Definitely straight out of the Apple "think of the kids" playbook there. The same "security risks" that are present with PWAs hold true for standard apps.

Ironically, everyone laughed at Chromebooks being just web browsers, yet here we are talking about Tim Apple making announcements about extra support for PWAs, the very thing that got Chromebooks to the level they are today.

Also, signing your message with a weird signature isn't as cool as you think it is.
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To be fair, Spotify is in fact a web app wrapped into a native app shell.

As a web developer, I'd love PWA to become a thing so we can code once and deploy both on Android and iOS without using stuff like React Native or Xamarin but I don't think they will be become popular anytime soon.
 
CarAnalogy said:
One wonders why many things would need to have an app at all. Theoretically this is the answer to the problem of cross platform development.

Safari has access to the entire device, the current limitations could be overcome as necessary.

But then at what point is the phone just Safari managing all the apps.
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Almost two decades ago I was in a strategy meeting with executives from one of the major 3 US carriers and another very prominent smart phone manufacturer…

There was an approach they were seriously considering for the future of mobile devices. That they would simply be “dumb” terminals with a basic SIP architecture allowing the dynamic delivery of applications and services to them.

In this case the carrier would determine what would and would not run on the phone/device in its entirety.

On the one hand this approach freed the device from many constraints imposed by the manufacturer’s choices for user experience…. But it still kept the carriers in place to “decide” for the user.

In the end, even this approach to the challenge of delivering a truly user focused experience was flawed as it was less about them and more about what “they” wanted for them.

Bottom line is this…. To all smart device manufacturers…. Please kindly get the “heck” out of the way and allow your customers who purchase and own your HARDWARE determine what they wish to run in it.

That is the only honest and reasonable solution.
 
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I have no 3rd party apps on my phone. For insta and YouTube etc I just go to safari. Apps are an excuse to harvest inexcusable amounts of data on people’s phones. These web apps would be no different imo. If they are not just more than a book marked link? Right?
 
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BenGoren said:
“From a developer perspective, going down the PWA route means you avoid the potential hassle of getting your app through Apple's App Store review process.”

So … why the outrage over Apple’s curation of the App Store? I get that there are features that a PWA doesn’t have access to, like Bluetooth or ApplePay … but as to the former, of course it’s a giant security hole for any random Web site (or Web app) to have access to Bluetooth; and, for the latter, nothing is stopping a Web site from asking you to type in your credit card — and, presumably, AutoFill still works.

This should be Apple’s go-to-answer for all the cries for them to open up the App Store: the PWAs are every bit the wild-wild-West as the Google world, but with minimal reasonable guardrails to prevent malware from taking control of your earbuds or draining your credit card.

b&
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The irony here is that Apple's original plan was for developers to create webapps for iOS. That's why this ability to save webapps to the homescreen even exists in the first place. They had planned to build out a full range of webhooks and APIs to support webapps every bit as much as a traditional app. But Apple was accused to trying to control everything and keep developers out and ended yielding to the demands to allow native development... only now to be accused to trying to control everything and keep developers out. 🤦‍♂️
 
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hydrochloride said:
Push notifications work, but no badging on the app icon. But latter doesn’t work on Windows Edge for Outlook PWA neither, although Edge has an API for that.
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Push notifications themselves will not badge the icon - there is a Badge API sites need to use as well.
 
JuicyGoomba said:
Everyday I hear people complaining about things like the Amazon app being garbage, and I suggest to those people that they should just use the website and they ignore me. They seem to prefer the pain of using poorly maintained apps.
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Just the other day I was ordering something from Amazon and was getting horribly frustrated with the app. So I switched to the website and had much better success. For me I think my brain is conditioned when I’m on my phone to think “There’s an app for that” so I guess I should use it.
 
BenGoren said:
Do you really want everybody everywhere to be naked all the time
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Thinking, thinking, thinking . . . Will I be able to choose the people around me and is it possible for me to leave my clothes on? I’m asking for a friend.
 
That was the idea back in 2007 but the technology wasn't there.
So many apps are just worse versions of the website and for some reason eat up hundreds of megabytes of storage yet still seem to download half the internet every time you restart them. I assume many of those apps are just their own browser built-in and that's all the extra baggage.

If those PWA live in their own little container so they can't do cross-site tracking, that's great. Restore my last session and preferences from a cookie? Yes please.
 
MrCrowbar said:
That was the idea back in 2007 but the technology wasn't there.
So many apps are just worse versions of the website and for some reason eat up hundreds of megabytes of storage yet still seem to download half the internet every time you restart them. I assume many of those apps are just their own browser built-in and that's all the extra baggage.

If those PWA live in their own little container so they can't do cross-site tracking, that's great. Restore my last session and preferences from a cookie? Yes please.
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The whole Web 2.0 and app or service on demand question has been asked and answered over and over again for decades now. The reality is hybrid approaches will always be most resilient.

Offer a live view of data when connected and an offline view when not connected. But relying on a connection to a network to deliver an interface and core processing is just too optimistic to ever be practical.

Putting it more simply you have a single point of failure for the entire application for EVERY user out there. The crazy thing is our obsession with cloud technologies has further fueled this seemingly relentless march back towards the “thin client” or “dumb terminal” but compute has become so cheap over the years that it makes very little sense to the end user. But it makes lots of sense to a greedy corporation that might want to milk their user base for every dollar they can in perpetuity.

We should always have the option of maintaining a “local copy” of an application that can operate independently of the network. It’s not the case for many apps we use today but it damn well should be.

The web app experience on iPhone is what is is. Nothing to write home about that’s for certain.

I’m actually underwhelmed that it’s taken them this many years to introduce basic web push messaging into their own web app platform LOL. Desktop browsers have had this functionality for years and years now.
 
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JuicyGoomba said:
Everyday I hear people complaining about things like the Amazon app being garbage, and I suggest to those people that they should just use the website and they ignore me. They seem to prefer the pain of using poorly maintained apps.

You're completely correct about most things not needing an app. They don't need an app. What they need is an extra outlet to harvest more data from your device.

Fact is, every website needs to be as functional as it can possibly be, and the app will always be an afterthought to an extent. Just look at how many apps there still are on the store that are basically just web wrappers.

As a side note, the apps do function as a pretty excellent marketing tool. Afterall, if you unlock your phone at the end of a bust day and the first icons you see are Starbucks and McDonalds, what's the first thing your brain is gonna want to do?
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As much as I feel the Youtube app has some clunkiness, there are some aspects about Youtube via safari on the iPhone/iPad is awful, almost as if Google makes it intentionally less robust to guide users to download their app. The location of the video play button, scrub bar, etc. are way too close together and always result in mis-taps. The YouTube app and YouTube on safari on an iPad/iPhone is just something I tolerate, with no clear winner. I'll defer to my MBA when accessing Youtube if/when at all possible.
 
Good recall @inkswamp !

For the rest, those who initially dismissed the concept of web apps but are embracing it now...
welcome to the party pal.png

Those of us who include chromebooks in the mix of devices we use are already familiar with PWAs. There are a lot of benefits, but there are few detriments as well....

Perhaps the greatest is losing the last of a sense of "ownership" of an app. The app owner can effectively pull it at any time. They can change the look and feel at will. The concept of ownership has eroded over the decades but this effectively ends it (should it become the norm). Essentially we're returning to the days of the raise-floor, glass-walled centralized computer room. But this is best left for another thread.
 
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8000XE said:
Would love to know if Outlook will support push notifications- I’m not able to have the app on my device so I use the PWA. Notifications would be a home run for me from Outlook 365
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Like you, my work prevents me from using Outlook on my personal iPhone and, therefore, I'm forced to rely on the O365 website. While I'd love it if the O365 web app fully supported push notifications using the web app, I'm not sure it would be useful for me and likely many others, as my work automatically signs me out of the O365 website after a ridiculously short period of time --- I think 10 minutes.
 
Nice article, glad to see some coverage of web apps! I rolled out a mapping/gps web app about two years ago and am constantly enhancing it and adding new content. I went this way because my app is exactly the same on all platforms and devices. There are certainly some limitations - especially with data storage - but I just accept those until such time as I decide to create an app store version.

I never heard about PWA's (Progressive Web Apps) until I started doing some research on the topic about three years ago. IMO, it's only natural to call them "web apps" because it's easy to say and understand, where "progressive web apps" is a real mouthful.

But Apple's support of web apps is really weak. To the average user, there's no clear difference between saving a Safari bookmark on the home screen as opposed to actually installing a web app. On Android, Chrome usually asks if you want to install the app and even if it doesn't, there's a menu option to install the app. Same with Chrome, Edge, Firefox and other browsers on MacOS and Windows - they all have the option to install a website as an app. But desktop Safari stands alone with no support at all for web apps - there's no way to install them. You need an alternate browser to use web apps on the Mac.

There's an important distinction between an installed web app and a website that I didn't see mentioned in the article. A web app has persistent data storage but a website does not. From what I've read, Apple made a change to Safari several years ago such that website data would be automatically purged if you don't visit the site for a week. That's a problem if the site stores preferences and other data with the localStorage API. However, this won't happen with a progressive web app installed on your home screen, your data should still be there even if you don't use the app often.
 
That was my point.... I don't think you can, unless you look at the website code. On MacOS, you know it's not a web app though, since Safari doesn't support them. But if you go to the site in Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc on MacOS, if it's a web app then there will be the option to install it. With a regular website, there will not.
 
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Boyd01 said:
I don't think you can
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...Thinking about this for a moment, I realized there is a way. A web app runs in it's own full-screen window which you will see separately from Safari when you go to the app switcher.

But, of course, you would have to add it to your home screen first without knowing if it's a web app or not.
 
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