Name a modern game that required you to manually manage game state files, let alone didn’t have autosave. It’s a feature users expect, and they’re going to have a bad time. I don’t want to play a quick game on my phone and have to remember to save and where I am keeping my save files.
I’d argue a far better options would be just to treat local storage as a permission like camera or microphones.
The current way iOS does it (either keep the game installed forever or erase all your progress when deleting it) is a huge barrier to me getting invested in iOS games at all. With “save progress to file” (and loading), I would be a lot more comfortable.
I would still want autosave though. No way do I want to go back to the era of “oh all my work for the past 6 hours is just gone?”
The issue with the permission model is there has to be a mechanism to prevent overuse which I believe is always worked around by annoying the user with the prompt as often as possible until they concede.
My browser storage is not a game developers long term storage, its a cache.
> My browser storage is not a game developers long term storage, its a cache.
IndexedDB is explicitly not a cache, it's long-term data storage for significant amounts of data.
No, they generally won't. There also aren't really any "alternative browsers" on iOS, they're all Webkit-based.
> So why wouldn’t user settings exist for other kinds of permanent or session storage?
Nobody is saying there shouldn't be any settings or consent in this regard. What we get here is not a setting, we get one major player deciding that there will be no way to properly implement offline web apps on their platform.
I find this position absurd, just like the suggestion that everyone should start programming complicated user hostile save flows.