That would annoy me, too. Maybe they could have it only work for when you Add to Homescreen as a progressive web app, then it would be more opt-in.

This is actually the perfect compromise that I haven’t even thought of until you’ve mentioned it. Up until now, I was opposed to webkit push notifications for the same reason as the grandparent comment. Thank you for your comment.

Unfortunately Apple has crippled PWAs compared to the exact same code running in the browser on multiple occasions. Up until just about a year and a half or so ago you couldn't access a WebRTC stream from a PWA. The main use-case I needed this for was for a barcode scanner (which uses WebRTC under the hood) so my options were "deal with browser chrome" or "repackage into an app", I ended up doing the second (and to be fair that was my ultimate goal) but I would have preferred to skip dealing with that until later (prototyping is still faster on web for me, even with live dev builds on mobile).

AFAIK historically Home Screen web apps were run in a separate runner from the main Safari based on the web view control, and thus limited. There was a time they didn't get native JIT for javascript, either.

My suspicion is that they internally treat it as their own third party browser - e.g. they don't want to give it more entitlements/capabilities than a Firefox or Chrome browser would have from the iOS app store.

My suspicion also is that they have had a bit more wood behind the arrow to get media APIs working lately due to pushing large third-party cloud game subscription services to use the browser, and the regulatory scrutiny that likely brought on.

You're welcome! Yeah, I didn't even know that they could segregate it based on whether it was going through the Add to Homescreen option, but learned of it through the article:

> Web App Manifest improvements include ensuring the browser always fetches the manifest file during page load instead of when the user chooses to “Add to Home Screen” from the Share menu.

Apple could implement this with a default of "automatically decline all", allowing users to only manually opt-in when they feel the need without ever seeing a prompt.

If you mean html/css prompts rather than actual browser prompts: they already do that.

It’s available on desktop and not that annoying.

They could use their differential privacy to only allow for sites that have a reasonable opt in rate, and global opt out.

> It’s available on desktop and not that annoying.

It’s pretty annoying.

- the dialog is model

- it’s small, and drops down from the top (a “reverse toast”?)

- I frequently use screen zoom So am typically unable to see the top of any window because I’m reading content

- I click a link, the page loads, the “toast” drops down but I don’t see it, suddenly nothing on the page works

For 99% of sites which ask for permission the answer is “no”. So that’s a lot of annoying web sites.

A lot of these complaints are about the underlying notification system, which is way, way better on iOS than on Mac, and is already what you get if you have app notifications anyway.