Web Push It Real Good

Let’s call it what it is: Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) were a great idea full of potential but they never really caught on. One reason for that was that although you could add any website to the Home Screen in Apple’s iOS, it always felt like nothing more but a fancy bookmark. Your PWA would get a nice app icon and open immediately, but it had no access to crucial system level features like notifications.

This changed yesterday with the release of iOS and iPadOS 16.4 beta 1. What nobody would have deemed possible for years finally happened: Apple added support for Web Push to home screen web apps. Developers can now use the Push API, Notifications API, and Service Workers to send system notifications after asking for permission. Those notifications will work exactly like other app notifications. They will show up in places like your Lock Screen or in Notification Center and you control them via the system settings.

One more thing…

iOS and iPadOS 16.4 will also add support for the Screen Wake Lock API, the Screen Orientation API, the User Activation API, and Web Codecs API video support.

The Web platform always wins.

~

23 Webmentions

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@matthiasott
@matthiasott one of the best earworms: https://youtu.be/vCadcBR95oU Salt-N-Pepa - Push It (Official Music Video)
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@owa
@matthiasott What I really like about WebKit's approach is that as a site owner you can only start to tap into push notifications, once somebody has installed your web app. Not sure WebKit's advancement can be attributed to the appeal of the web, though (as in "The Web platform always wins"). This time it is probably related to the successes of the @owa / https://open-web-advocacy.org/ group and the impending ...
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Christian "Schepp" Schaefer
And I think WebKit in this case is not correct. It's Apple Safari as WebKit by itself has almost nothing to do with integrating push notifications (it's mostly OS and push infrastructure)
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@matthiasott
@matthiasott Are there any good guides out there for building Progressive Web Apps for iOS? #iOS #WebApps #WebDev #WebDevelopment #ProgressiveWebApps #PWA iOS progressivewebapps pwa webapps webdev webdevelopment
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@msb
@msb here you go https://andy-bell.co.uk/i-wired-up-my-feedbin-likes-to-auto-post-to-mastodon/ I wired up my Feedbin likes to auto-post to Mastodon
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@andy
@andy what are you using to post the “I really enjoyed reading:” posts? A service or just manually adding?
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Ralf Wiechers
Finally: #PushNotifications on there way into #iOS: matthiasott.com/notes/web-push…

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