Facebook says Apple is too powerful – they're right

Re:Facebook says Apple is too powerful – they're right by vorpalhex on Monday June 20, 2022 @01:05PM (#31812729)

1. Safari did not support PWAs at this time. Other browsers did.

2. Safari had and still has some pretty gnarly bugs that require special workarounds.

3. You could not put a link to a website on the homescreen of iOS

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Re:Facebook says Apple is too powerful – they're right by ec109685 on Monday June 20, 2022 @01:28PM (#31813025)

Apple has had PWA’s for years.

Tumblr is perfectly fine on the web, but they want people to download the app so they can use push notifications to juice engagement.

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Re:Facebook says Apple is too powerful – they're right by vorpalhex on Monday June 20, 2022 @01:49PM (#31813298)

That's a lie.

As of Aug 2021, PWA support basically didn't exist except for some parts of the manifest file. No background tasks, none of the major APIs were implemented, and you got nothing but an app tile on your homescreen.. even navigating back and forth from the PWA to another app caused the PWA to lose state. Data storage was basically a nightmare.

There are STILL basic fundamental things missing.

When the tumblr saga was going on, I still don't think you could even read PWA manifests or add them to your homescreen!

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Re:Facebook says Apple is too powerful – they're right by ec109685 on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @12:32AM (#31819908)

Here's the definitive list: https://firt.dev/notes/pwa-ios/

None of those things are necessary to create a very full featured Tumblr web application. E.g. twitter works quite well on mobile web.

Tumblr wants people to download the app for engagement purposes.

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