The addition of push notifications is long awaited, and necessary to take PWA to the next level.
It is the single biggest hurdle for me in developing PWAs for iOS. Bring it on!
It is the single biggest hurdle for me in developing PWAs for iOS. Bring it on!
It means people can start developing apps for the web that will basically work on any platform that can run a browser. A huge step forward for the web platform that has so far been stunted by Apple's unwillingness to support these web standards
I almost never approve a notification request. From anything, be it an app or a website. Off the top of my head the only notification sources that I have enabled are messaging apps, and even there I only have them turned on for the couple that I use for my most important communications.
I consider it a nuisance and almost an anti-feature that every random app nags me to give it notification permissions. By the same token, granting that anti-feature to even more things if something I Do. Not. Want.
Apple's implementation will likely have a toggle in the settings to decide whether or not you can be prompted for this permission. In fact, you can already do this with Firefox (and I assume Chrome).
The people like you and me who don't allow any notifications anyways will likely just turn off the prompt entirely. But for developers, this helps bring the web platform one step closer to equal treatment as native platforms and can dramatically open up the ecosystem Apple currently so tightly controls
A calendar app, a messaging app, etc. All sort of apps have reasonable use cases for notifications, and now you can write those apps as persistent web apps on iOS.
The user should still have control over notifications of course, and if you're downloading, let's say, a shopping app, no reason to allow notifications, it'll just be ads or whatever.
Overall, flexibility is good.
Messaging services can also make an app, because I sure as shit don’t want my entire browser to become more annoying just because someone can’t be assed making an app. Hopefully safari will gate this BS on making a home screen app rather than just making every site a beacon of “add notifications so that we can sell you to advertisers even when you aren’t on our site!”
> Overall, flexibility is good.
It would seem we're unlikely to agree on the value proposition of notifications from random websites. My assumption is that I'll see a bunch of BS "get notifications" spam from a variety of sites, none of which have any reason to justify the spam. Just as happened with the first version of "let's give websites the ability to spam users. Surely that won't be abused" notification system.
Personally I don’t really see the point.
Native apps are good for Apple, web apps are bad for them. They've been using their full control of one of the world's most important computing platforms to cripple the web platform. If web apps really were that unappeling to users and developers, they wouldn't need to worry. Just stop the obstructions, and the market would decide in the favor of native apps. That they've been fighting this tooth and nail tells you that they have no confidence.
And let's be clear, Apple never even needed to do the work themselves. They just needed to stop blocking competing browsers. Again, if notifications are so bad, surely the users would have staid in Apple's no-notification garden rather than ship to a browser with that feature. But again, they have no confidence in their users actually choosing Safari.
Literally the last thing I want from a random website is notification spams and pop up, but woooooo soon I guess I’ll have to get used to pop ups asking me to receive ads from websites all over again.
If I decide I like/need your service I would expect an app to be available, because again, I don't want the constant threat of my messages being tied to the identity the various spyware companies have built from my browsing. I also don't want to have to switch to my browser and then find the message tab or wait for a giant multi-meg web app to download again. If Safari limits access to the spam API to just home screened pages then I wouldn't mind the addition of notification spam: creating a home screen app is a reasonable indication the user does value a site highly, and more importantly limits the ability of random sites to spam me with notification requests.
Don't get me wrong, I understand that you can make mediocre cross platform webapps more easily than actual good apps, it's just that as a user I don't care. The argument "this is easier for me" falls flat because plenty of other people have been able to make apps, and those apps are typically better, but they actually get basic platform behavior correct. Failing that you can make an electron or similar app, and have all the crappy cross-platform BS, but hey at least you get to ask to spam me and you can't sell me out with spyware linked to my normal browser instance.
This isn't about regular web pages that want to annoy you.
I can't wait to see what the proportion of "hey let us spam you" requests from sites is to sites that have any reasonable justification. I'm guessing it won't be good. Just as happened with the first API that gave sites notifications.