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Comment by theodorton | Hacker News Reader

No, it doesn’t. We just built a merchant app for the App Store where merchants of our platform should be able to handle and process orders made on our website from customers.

Apple refused to approve the app unless we added a storefront to our app and used in-app purchases. But that’s not something we consider a core feature of the app.

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Seems they are trying to add these restrictions to smaller new apps and not mess with already established markets. Apple is quite literally toxic to innovation by these practices.

You sound like the right sort of person to ask: what do you make of PWAs as an alternative to proper apps on the AppStore?

I've seen various demos and showcases, some of them with pretty impressive UIs, but I've never encountered PWAs outside of exploring them as a novelty.

Not the person you're asking, but I've seen it suggested that Apple is slow to implement PWA features into Safari, perhaps precisely for this reason.

Would love to be corrected on this btw.

We're switching our app from Xamarin to be a PWA (by slowly making our web-app's HTML+JS work as a PWA) - primarily so we don't need to deal with disparate codebases - but avoiding Apple's App Store police is part of the benefit. We were never at risk of breaking Apple's policies because we're B2B, but being to publish updates immediately without having to wait 24-48+ hours for App Store review (and having to explain our app to the reviewer and create a test account for them) is a huge benefit.

We made the change after reassessing the PWA landscape and seeing that iOS 13 and Android's level of support for PWA features makes it worthwhile. Apple is dragging its feet with PWAs - but the way our app works means we don't need any of the missing functionality (like Web Push) and iOS's weird PWA app lifecycle suits our application fine as it isn't intended to be used offline for more than a few hours anyway.

The current deal breakers on iOS are missing push messaging and background operation. So in almost every use case, the user will have to be actively using your PWA for it to provide value. Those two missing features just cripple the experience and apple knows that.

That doesn't sound right. My app redirects to my website store and Apple never had a problem with that, even after I specifically removed IAP.

If there's one thing that's constant, it's that Apple is somewhat arbitrary when it comes to "enforcing" their TOS on the small guys.

Yeah we got away with this for 3 years too and in our most recent updates have been forced to add IAP. As another poster mentioned they've been cracking down tighter and tighter even on small apps.

Do you sell physical products?

Our product has a real-world component yes but the payment part had more to do with the online subscription (which gave you access to the real world component).

Covid killed our product though so for us I'm relieved I don't have to deal with Apple's shit anymore to get the app deployed.

Still have to deal with it for other clients though :/

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