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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

There’s a huge caveat here: it only works for webapps you’ve installed to your Home Screen, which is a Byzantine process few work out organically.

It’s progress, I’m happy to see it, but Apple are still behind the curve here. It should be much, much simpler to install an app to the Home Screen when huge features like this are locked behind the gate.

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Clicking the share icon and then add to home screen is byzantine?

Byzantine is a bit much, but it's not particularly discoverable if you don't already know what you're looking for.

It's completely non-discoverable!

The only way to even find out if a website actually offers a PWA (assuming you know what that is, which is probably not true for >90% of users at this point) is to add it to your homescreen and then see if you get essentially just a bookmark, or an actual PWA.

If you offer a PWA can't you just have a wee css popup with a big arrow floating at the bottom of the screen pointing out exactly how to install it?

The instructions to install vary by device, OS version, etc. etc.

It should just be equivalent to native apps. A link to an App Store URL takes the user directly to an install screen. It was clearly seen as enough of an issue that they implemented that, so there's no reason web apps can't be the same.

As far as I'm aware since iOS 1 the instructions have always just been "click share button => Add to home screen" on all of their devices.

If you think the bulk of users even know what "share icon" is you're kidding yourself. If you think they find that modal window intuitive you're kidding yourself. Even then, you're sharing... to the home screen? "Share to the Home Screen" is not the way anyone thinks about installing an app. The whole concept is a mess.

I don't.. that's why I asked if a giant " click here" floating thingie might help. (HN strips them out: https://emojipedia.org/white-down-pointing-index-dark-skin-t...)

That's what I'm saying about device variation: that downward pointing arrow would be incorrect on an iPad because the share button is in the top right. Exactly how far from the right depends on OS version, whether the screen is portrait or landscape, whether you have a larger text size enabled in accessibility settings...

And _all_ of this is ignoring the fact that Android also exists. Half the point of using the web is to be able to do stuff cross platform, once you start sniffing user agents and screen dimensions you're creating something doomed to fail in the long term.

So you’re saying that you’d like to send web notifications to users who aren’t “technical enough” to add a website to their home screen? Surely then they are also not technical enough to unsubscribe from these spammy popups. I am glad that Apple protects my mom from this nightmare.

How is any of this different to native apps, though?

Native apps stop spamming notifications after you delete them from home screen.

Yes, I've seen sites do this, such as https://post.news

Ask any average user how they’d go about installing a web site to their Home Screen and they’ll just stare at you blankly.

I guess Byzantine is the wrong word. It’s not discoverable because no one knows what they’re even looking for.

I think that more likely no one cares about this beside few tech-savvy users and they don't need a guide to do it.

I don’t think anyone cares, no, because to them it’s a meaningless technical distinction.

They shouldn’t have to care. I think they want to install an app. If it were equivalently easy to install a webapp vs native most users would be happy with either. But native is a two-tap process, web is a mess.

PWA is also a two-tap process - and with less cognitive dissonance. No reading reviews, terms of service, privacy docs. No "onboarding" workflow.

You lost the user at "Clicking the share icon".

Is it harder than clicking on App Store icon?

Especially if you put a nice large animated instruction right on the web page.

Yes, it's way harder because "share" is semantically incompatible with installing an app.

But, less hard than dragging a CD/DVD to the trash can to eject it.

Even less hard than writing machine code in binary.

In Apple parlance I believe they call it the action button not the share button. If understood that way adding to Home Screen is easy to find. The fact that so many people on HN keep calling it the share button means that Apple hasn’t communicated the concept very well.

I Google "ios action button" and find nothing. I google "ios share button" and screens full of the button we're talking about. So regardless of "Apple parlance", this is the "share button".

Absolutely, yes - and this is a great example of how out of touch most software-experienced people are with how stupendously confusing/non-discoverable most UI is for most users.

It's not intuitive and most users won't find it. I honestly didn't think Apple wanted the web to succeed, so I was surprised when Jen Simmons joined but it seems like she's moving the needle!.

This is a really good little animation to teach users how to add it to the home screen: https://streakscore.com/help

You mean random websites can't spam you with notification requests unless you've taken a step to indicate that it's a special app?

I'm also curious how badging would work for non-home screen apps?

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