Safari 11 supports WebRTC, Media Capture API, WebAssembly, WebCrypto API, drag-and-drop, and other interesting new features. If a crippled browser is their goal, they're doing quite an awful job of it.
https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Ne...
If the only possible market is desktop Safari users then it's usually a rounding error not worth the development time.
Hmm, not the open web I'm familiar with.
Ah, thank you for explaining the difference.
I emailed the guy in charge of Safari on iOS and he said they have no plans to implement web push notifications on iOS!
Now when we are super close to really supporting progressive web apps, apple is holding back (potentially to protect that golden calf of an app store).
I’m pretty sure you'd be wrong. Apple announced that it's paid over $70 billion to app developers since the App Store became a thing in 2008 at today's WWDC keynote. This is the 30% Apple pays developers; so we're talking about $233 billion in gross transactions in less than 10 years.
Apple is likely to be the first trillion dollar valuation company; I seriously doubt it's worried about web apps encroaching upon a fairly small part of it's revenue: http://fortune.com/2017/03/31/apple-trillion-dollar-company/
If they enabled more progressive webapp features, we'd start to see a lot more cross platform webapps. That would not be in Apple's interest.
That argument might have worked in back in the day when the iPhone was only available on AT&T but not in a world where the iPhone is available to more people than it ever has been before.
The iPhone is perhaps the single most successful product ever, with over 1 billion sold: http://www.asymco.com/2016/07/28/most-popular-product-of-all...
The total marketshare of Android is around 2 billion, but that's the total of Samsung, Motorola, HTC, LG, etc. None of them have individually sold a billion Android phones themselves.
If they enabled more progressive webapp features, we'd start to see a lot more cross platform webapps. That would not be in Apple's interest.
Do you think Apple cares more about selling a $700 iPhone or a 99¢ app? They have over a million native apps for iOS; what keeps that ecosystem strong is how Apple is able to innovate each year on new features for the iPhone, iPad and iOS, not by restricting what web apps can do.
The most compelling features are things web apps aren't very good at anyway. I seriously doubt Tim Cook is losing sleep worrying about Service Workers and the like.
People said the same thing about WebRTC and how it would compete with FaceTime. And now we have WebRTC in the new versions of macOS and iOS, so it's time to create reasons why other web features aren't there.
Web apps have made a lot of progress but for the average user in a developed country, the user experience pales in comparison to native apps.
They can ignore it exactly because of their appstore and aura of exellence.
But in real world i know so many people who dont have single app on iphone. They cant even imagine what simple link could give them. This could go very wrong way for apple. Imagine their excelent app devs start to make webap version of their apps. Many of the beatifuly designed ones could work very easily on web platform. Suddenly it becomes trend and iphone app exclusivity is gone. Plus apple looses control over the market.
I for one would like to be able to opt in for notifs for events of certain clubs, galleries etc. It feels like sms for your fans. Much faster than newsletter much less busy than social networks.