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.