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A comment on Apple is threatening to remove Fanhouse unless they give 30% of creator earning. Parent comment

Re:Apple is threatening to remove Fanhouse unless they give ... by jeroenhd on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @05:42PM (#27453622)
Push is supported by all competent browsers, which of course excludes Internet Explorer, Android WebView (the shitty built-in one) and Safari (iOS and desktop) [0]. Firefox (on every platform but iOS) even supports a limited amount of silent pushes. I personally wouldn't want silent background pushes to an installed web app anyway, I don't see what data is important enough to sync but not important enough to notify about. Such a mechanism would absolutely ruin the device's battery life.

Google, being Google, have developed a Background Sync API [1] that can achieve background sync without notifying the user. This also extends to Edge and Opera and such because they share an engine.

I can see the use in a system where you sync data to a device that has intermittent connectivity, but I've honestly never seen such a system work for native apps when I've had intermittent connectivity myself. Even Google's automatic weather notifications don't show the right weather until I tap then and a web search loads.

Your background sync requirement is a nice to have and it'd certainly be a reason to use the app instead of the web version of a service for users with limited connectivity, but they're not really strict requirements for most applications. The applications we use today mostly consist of scrolling and connected browsing, with some data management and sync in between. For example, I browse twitter through the web app and outside the "fleets", whatever they are, that Twitter simply decided not to port, I'm not missing anything. I get notifications, I can browse, I can compose, there's really nothing more I need.

In the end, Apple's (intentional, probably) nerfing of Safari is what primarily stands in the way of proper mobile app support on the web. Notifications are a feature that I'd say most apps would require these days and Apple simply refuses to allow them. There's plenty of other WebKit gripes that developers have to overcome to program for iOS, but the complete lack of certain features is absolutely the worst.

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API [1]: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/12/background...

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Re:Apple is threatening to remove Fanhouse unless they give ... by JamesSwift on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @09:06PM (#27455548)
Nitpick: background processing doesn't generally kill battery life because the platform API's provide guardrails around how long/frequent you can run, and batches as many wakeups together as possible. You essentially have a runtime budget you deplete as you run.

That said, you're right that most apps dont truly take advantage of background processing. What you have to understand is that the lack of background processing is what keeps notifications unsupported on iOS. Not only can you not support push messaging natively, but you can't _replicate_ a push messaging system either because there's no way to run code when your webpage/PWA isn't in the foreground.

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