Apple has decided to remove Progressive web apps from iOS in EU. If you have a business in the EU or serve EU users via Web App/PWA, we must hear from you in the next 48 hours!
I have literally never used a web app from the 3gs to this day. No idea why people think this is such a huge deal?
I’m using Android but I can give you a few personal examples on why I still prefer mobile websites to apps.
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The place where I take weather has a shitty app full of ads and always sending notifications. They don’t have PWA offered on their site but just going through a browser instead of the app is significantly better.
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YouTube’s app is also full of ads. So I use the mobile website in Firefox with uBlock Origin.
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Again with awful apps full of ads. Twitter is also much more tolerable through the mobile website. There’s no autoplay on FF and again, ads blocked.
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I still use IRC and my client is web based, so that I can see pictures and videos in my chats. The web based IRC client (The Lounge) offers PWA and it’s very nice to have the thing in a “clean” browser.
Again, I don’t use Apple for reasons like this, but Firefox is already pretty bad with PWA and having those possibilities mangled or removed wouldn’t be acceptable to me.
Maybe you don’t use a browser on mobile and just do everything through terrible apps. Maybe most people do the same. But if you don’t use it, why do you care if those using it want to retain the possibility to do so?
I personally don’t watch TV so nobody watches TV anymore, right?
For YouTube, I’ve found NewPipe (and probably others) offers a much better experience than YouTube in the web.
The real reason I want PWAs to be a thing is because I don’t want to always use iOS and Android, and PWAs allow me to use an alternative. I really want to use a Linux phone like Pinephone, and PWAs will be a big part of that transition. PWAs are the only truly cross-platform development option, so they offer value to web devs as well as users.
The lemmy app Voyager for iOS, one of the most popular as it behaves like Apollo from Reddit, is a PWA.
They’re removing pwa from the desktop, not stopping them from functioning entirely.
You can still have a cobbled together insecure piece of trash but you gotta go to its url in the browser instead of clicking the app.
Hell, you can still have a shortcut to it on the desktop.
insecure piece of trash
Websites are more tightly sandboxed and more secure than native apps.
you gotta go to its url in the browser instead of clicking the app.
PWAs are more than just an app icon. “PWA” also means usage of particular APIs such as allowing the web app to work offline.
I’m not gonna get into a back and forth over pwa security. It’s worth noting that offline pwa hasn’t worked on iOS for at least a year and two major versions of the os.
PWAs has a bunch of other features too. Either way apple should fix the offline part instead of being assholes.
How is a piece of software that runs in the browser instead of directly in the os, uses a million little libraries and became popular as a way to avoid scrutiny on the distribution platform less secure than a website?
Let’s assume you have great answers for all that and I’m made to look like a fool: when someone goes to a website, their guard is up. When they click on an app their guard is down.
If nothing else pwas bypass user distrust of weird crap on the internet and that’s a bad thing
@bloodfart @kilgore_trout
“How is a piece of software that runs in the browser instead of directly in the os… less secure than a website?”
The question answered itself 😂
@bloodfart @kilgore_trout
“when someone goes to a website, their guard is up. When they click on an app their guard is down.”
???
@kilgore_trout @bloodfart apple wants people to jump through THEIR hoops to run anything on their phone, so they can get a 30% cut of the money. That’s why they’re so rich. PWAs bypass that. Apple would kill off web browsers too if they had the power - just like they did kill off Flash, which made the web too powerful for Apple at the time, giving not enough incentive to install their walled garden apps.
Didn’t Firefox kill PWA support too.
What was Mozilla’s reason behind this?
Do they? I haven’t been able to figure it how to save a shortcut for a PWA, so all the PWAs on my phone use Chrome :/
