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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

I guess, but I will keep blocking them whether they are mobile apps or web apps. Few apps have any business sending notifications.

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Agreed! I don’t know why anyone would want that. And even Apple is getting bad with their own notifications. I just got one from Apple Music yesterday about the Super Bowl. WTF? I had to turn off Notifications for that now, too.

> I don’t know why anyone would want that.

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.

Happily good calendaring apps have a standard protocol to communicate with calendar apps that don’t load a ton of Facebook and Google stalkerware every time you load them, and let their users just use their prefer calendar app.

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!”

My favorite calendar app is a PWA that uses those standard protocols to integrate with services, plus some other features that I want. And soon, it will have notifications, too.

> Overall, flexibility is good.

Ah, see I prefer not to have my personal data proliferated to a bunch of additional companies that want to monetize my data, and I like my use of such apps to not include spyware linking that to all the trackers on the web.

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.

Is it really worth it, when there are so many good native apps instead?

Personally I don’t really see the point.

One point is to not allow Apple to act as the gatekeeper to what applications can be implemented and used on iOS. A second is to not force implementors of a fundamentally cross-platform application where I care about the service rather than the technology stack to waste huge amounts of resources on reimplementing the app multiple times. A third is having the economic gains of the app go to the people who actually did the work, not to the middleman who has been resting on their laurels for 15 years, collecting their 30%.

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.

It's not that websites will now send you notifications. It's that PWAs will now have the option to ask to send you notifications in the same way any other app on your iPhone does.

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 think the post you're replying to reflects a very different view of the utility notifications, which I share.

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.

I'm with you and almost never grant permissions for anything. I even have notification badges turned off for everything they'll let me turn it off for (everything but the Settings app).

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

And yet almost every site that asks for notifications do if exclusively to spam you.

You can simply block the ability of websites to even prompt you... That's what I do on Firefox

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