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It Just Works™... until you don't want to take the default option. I'm sure your average user would just be SoL if going through this same experience.

Keychain is one of the worst APIs on Apple platforms, with parts that date all the way back to MacOS 9. It's not surprising there are various breaking bugs from decades of low maintenance.

Yeah, iOS would never kill an app in the background to try and save battery

Did this exact thing for my four and six-year-old kids. I used an Ooma Telo Air[1] (Free + ~$6/mo in taxes and fees) and an old vTech landline phone. It's been highly successful in our house. The kids have (monitored) independence to call grandparents and aunts/uncles. Watching them translate written down 10-digit phone numbers into button presses is fun too.

1. https://www.ooma.com/home-phone-service/basic/


Some people feel just as passionate about OS-level notifications and location permissions, and they turn them off. You can turn them off in your browser's settings as well. You'll be okay.


People like you could turn off these features and continue installing and updating native binaries for the Starbucks app or random hardware companion apps all you want. I'd like first-class PWAs please.


Funny enough, I just replied to someone who posted a link to the great lengths Slack is going through to make it use less memory on the desktop.

https://slack.engineering/reducing-slacks-memory-footprint/

When the obvious answer I gave about how to reduce the memory footprint and make it more performant was “to stop using fucking [web technologies]” and create a native app

But the question I always ask people who say that it’s mean old Apple keeping PWAs back, why is it that all of these same companies see a need to create an app for Android?


To your last point surely it makes sense that they'd probably be rolling something like RN or similar where at that point they may as well build for Android app as well right?

Versus with proper PWA support across the board, a single button on the company's site that installs a PWA no matter which platform your customers are on.


Papa John’s doesn’t need a website seemingly and everything you can do on the app you can do on the website. Why is the app so much faster? I can say the same for banking apps, Airbnb, hotel apps, etc

There must be some reason that every major company decided to have an app even though today all of the same functionality is available on the web.


Average people don’t want to spend their lives managing permissions. You could go ahead and use Android or ChromeOS.

The web is a developer platform, not just a static document viewer.


Agreed. Very reasonable, very simple, and already possible on Android.


Author here. I have no affiliation with Chrome, and use Zen and Firefox Mobile pretty much exclusively. I recently made an ESP32 hardware side project that I can configure entirely in the web browser via Web Bluetooth, got hyped, then immediately sad that my page was never going to work on iOS / iPad OS. So I threw together this webpage from caniuse.com data.


No average person cares about your side project, and most people prefer Apple’s product decisions over the ones you’d like them to make. Based on your history with technology, you are a Windows developer who would like to distribute apps on Apple’s platform without learning about what makes for a great app on that platform.


Amazing site. Thanks for making it.


Of course! Thanks!


The source is caniuse.com data. The build script for the page is open-source as well.

https://github.com/leoherzog/pwa.gripe


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