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Comment by kelthuzad | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to be nit-picky and it might seem like a minor nuisance, but developers will need the ability to display a small banner/prompt to educate user's about the possibility of installing the website like a regular app, otherwise it will be lost on casuals. I really hope that Apple implements this fully and doesn't use strategic loopholes to sabotage Web Apps in small but clever ways.

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Sorry to be dimissive, I know it's good intentions and all, but please don't do that. We don't need any more unsolicited banners or prompts. See it's one reason native apps are so much preferred over websites. Websites always have banners and whatnot, good apps don't do these things.

> We don't need any more unsolicited banners or prompts.

If you open https://squoosh.app on a phone (or in browser dev tools emulating a phone), you will see what I think is a great example of use of an install prompt that I personally would be totally ok with.

screenshot – https://i.imgur.com/NALZpz8.png

> on a phone (or in browser dev tools emulating a phone)

or on any browser supporting Web Apps (like recent versions of Chrome/Chromium)

I actually tried it in Chrome on MacOS before writing my comment, and did not see the Install button, but only the tiny install hint in the url bar. That surprised me, because I clearly remembered the button; which is why I thought that maybe the button only appears on mobile browsers where it's harder to find the install option in browser's own ui. But now when I open it again in desktop Chrome, there it is, the Install button. Strange.

Fully agree. I'd say that there should be an agreed-upon way for users to opt out of any kind of obnoxious banner/"dickbar" but it'd probably be obeyed about as often as the "do not track" flag was.

A floppy disk icon somewhere that will download the PWA.

floppy disk? what's that? why would I ever click that?

I wouldn't hold my breath. This always was and I think still is the problem with web apps on iOS: there's no good way to prompt the user to add it to their Home Screen. There's tons of sites out there that do it in their own ad-hoc way, but point in the wrong place because they were designed for Safari (n-1).

Meanwhile there's long been special affordances to make it easy to go to an App Store page. The purpose of a system is what it does…

I think web pages can detect whether they’re running as a Web App using the display-mode media query (https://web.dev/learn/pwa/detection/)

If so, they can use that to help/annoy their users/casual visitors by showing an “install me as a web app” banner.

The trouble with that is every website will set the flag so they try and grab some nice traffic generating (they hope) screen real estate. So less savvy users will get a bad user experience with a home screen / dock full of spam sites because they always hit yes and tech savvy users will just turn off the banner as every site spams them with it. Plus, we already have enough spam interactions before you can actually use websites with stuff like notification enabling prompts, newsletter signups, chatbots and cookie stuff. No more please...

Websites do this already. On my iPad I have used sites that suggest doing this.

I would think this could be done the same way that some websites that are optimized for web apps on iOS will have a prompt (often pointing to the control) saying you can save the website as a web app.

Please no. Just have a button appear on the toolbar to install the site as a web app if it has a web app manifest, like Chromium browsers do.

I would prefer for PWAs to be in the Mac App Store. PWAs are already in the Windows Store, so there's a precedent.

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