If they want it, download the app then. Allow others to not download it and use a PWA if they'd like.

Actually I believe you're wrong: if people actually preferred Apple's way of doing it, Apple would have no reason to restrict other ways.

They restrict it because people prefer the other way, and that would harm Apple's profits.

They continue to restrict it because look at how much trash was (is?) on the Android store; they restricted it even more in the early days because of the torrent of low effort fart / gag apps.

That's a problem of having a single app store everyone has to go through. Why would you care about a thousand fart apps existing as PWAs online? They wouldn't affect you at all.

> They continue to restrict it because look at how much trash was (is?) on the Android store

You're saying this like there isn't any trash on the Apple App Store? Come on... Beyond the top lists or other discovery models, the Apple App Store contains bunch of things that will never even be downloaded by anyone...

It was more exclusive in the beginning, I give you that. But today, it has as much trash as any other app store.

The iOS app store has way more trash than the Android one. Android has lots of open source software. iOS has a bajillion crappy $2 apps instead. I got an iPad from work, and not only does it not have a calculator from Apple, it's really hard to find a lightweight, low-permission, ad-free calculator on the App Store. I eventually had to settle for one designed for iPhones.

I don't think that they care about not having useless apps. They care about the apps looking "integrated" in their system, right? I am an Android user and an Android developer, and I must admit that iOS apps usually look more consistent (in terms of UX).

And that's one of the values of Apple: this vertical integration that makes the overall thing look more polished (and probably easier to use to some extent).

Of course, they are happy to keep the restriction because they can take 30% commission on the paid apps, I'm not saying they are perfect and that there is nothing to improve. But I am not completely convinced that forcing them to lower their standards of integration (by allowing any kind of apps) is necessarily beneficial for the users.

After all, why do developers want PWAs? Probably mostly because it is cheaper for them, not because it's better for their users, right?

> After all, why do developers want PWAs? Probably mostly because it is cheaper for them, not because it's better for their users, right?

Wrong, PWAs can provide better services for users, and the lack of PWAs and enforcement of the App Store monopoly can hurt them[1]:

> The fact that Apple refuses to implement basic features in mobile Safari that Firefox and Chrome have had for years now, and the fact that they refuse to allow other browser engines on iOS is the reason why we can't have nice things like progressive web apps.

> I recently worked on a health app related to the COVID pandemic. The most common use case would be served really well by a PWA, and as such, there's no reason users would need to install an app on their phones to access the web app's full set of features.

> Despite the web app working perfectly on Android and across Windows, Linux and macOS without native integration, we now must dedicate time and resources to develop an additional iOS app just so iOS users, which over half of Americans are, aren't left out.

> This is an expensive endeavor time-wise and money-wise, during a pandemic where time is of the essence and resources are stretched thin. It shouldn't be this way, but it is.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26520148

You start by saying that PWAs provide better services than native apps (I don't believe it), and then you go on giving an example where it does not, but where you would like it to do because it would be cheaper?

Seems like you do confirm my points.

A non-profit lowering the amount of capital, labor and time it needs to meet users' needs during an emergency is an example of better benefits users can reap from being able to run PWAs versus being artificially limited from doing so by their phones' manufacturer.

Seems to me that you are generalizing from a far-fetched example.

I am not saying that users can never benefit from PWAs. I am saying that globally, I am not convinced that PWAs will improve the life of iOS users. Just like I don't feel like Electron is improving my life. Slack would maybe have to make a proper app if they did not have Electron, it's not like Salesforce doesn't have the money. I could even go further: if it was actually expensive for such companies to write apps for the platforms they need to support, maybe they would open their APIs. Slack/Discord are glorified IRC messengers, I would love to have a lightweight client to use them (instead of getting a full copy of Chromium for each).

> They continue to restrict it because look at how much trash was (is?) on the Android store; they restricted it even more in the early days because of the torrent of low effort fart / gag apps.

A yet there are a ton of low effort and literal fart apps on the App Store[1].

[1] https://i.imgur.com/AINmvSf.png

Average person does not know what they want. They don’t know how technology works.

They don’t even see difference between PWA and apps.

If everything becomes PWA, there is no transparency for the apps. No indication what data they collect. No control for the quality of the apps. No moderation over malicious apps.

PWAs need more permissions to provide the functionality people need, it is not just website.

This "average person"[non-techie] doesn't even know what PWA is/means/stands for. Truth.

Do they need to know what AAC or MP4 is to use Spotify?

The point is the experience, not the name of it.

> Average person does not know what they want.

The problem with statements like that, aside from the loftiness, is that you end up with a world where people who think they know better get to decide. I worked in the public sector digitalisation, and while I’m a programmer we were bundled with the rest of IT so I experienced what the supporters had to deal with. This included a lot of employees who genuinely couldn’t tell if the device they needed help for was an iOS or Android device without some guidance. So I’m not going to dispute the claims you make about how it’s nice to protect the “average person” from themselves, but I don’t think any of us will like the what that sort of thinking creates. Well, maybe some people will, but a lot won’t.

I recently wanted something for my two-factor keys and the best all I could find was for Android but not iOS. I ended up filming over a few $ for a Bitwarden subscription, but there are just a lot of little stories like that. I mean, I’m not in the audience for Fortnite, but I’m sure a lot of people were sad when it left iOS. A of which can be avoided if we stop giving all the power to the tech companies.

I’m not sure Apple really has anything to fear from it either in terms of security or usability. Part of the reason they sell so well, at least to me, is that they have the ease of use and tech that works out of the box. It’s very rare that I need side loading. I’m not a huge fan of the Safari enforcement, but it doesn’t really bother me either as I can still use FireFox and the sync. I think Google might have more to fear from it, since they need to peddle commercials inside apps like YouTube, and you can block that if they allow you to side-load app blockers, but for Apple I think almost everyone will just keep on trucking. It will of course hurt their control over payments, like the original poster points out, but that’s not really “my” or the “average persons” problem.

> I’m not sure Apple really has anything to fear from it either in terms of security or usability.

Sideloading will hit hard for Apple's pro-privacy brand.

You lose transparency and quality control for the apps. They don't need to tell you about their data collection practices. They don't have to do actually anything at all, since you can't ban those apps anymore.

Phishing is still a problem of Android and that will become a problem on iOS too. On Android there is still business for anti-virus engines because of the sideloading and Phishing. On Apple devices, there isn't really need for anti-virus but it will become relevant again.

If the sideloading will become very easy, big players who make money with data collection, will leave the platform. You won't find Meta apps soon from the App store. They are so big that people will download these apps regardless.

If that happens, how many fake Instagram apps we will see after that? And you can't ban them from the App store anymore.

I'm pretty sure "the average person doesn't know what they want" is a belief that powered everything from eugenics to genocide to our toxic culture around health, happiness and consumerism.

So it appears the non-average person doesn't have a clue what's right for the clueless masses either.

Liberty, choice, community and respect. That's all that is needed.

Yes, everyone who has a different utility function from you is a closet eugenicst.

Respect, as you say, is important. Leaf by example.

You took liberty to generalize what I said.

I was referring into technical implementations and what risks are included. It requires deep undertanding how these things work. Average user does not have it. Many aspects are invisible to the end-users, like the war against malware in App Store.

The end-user knows what they want in terms of end-result. How to to get the job done with a tool (app). They can compare end-results.

Sometimes, however not all results all there to be compared. Because, they don’t understand what kind of tools can be actually created. They are happy with the current one because they think it is the best what can be.

Or, what else the tool can do besides their advertised functionality. Which can be malicious or harmful to user in another way.

Or tools could work in a better way, but are currently hindered for monetary gain.

All this requires specialised knowledge.

What? You can both believe that “people don’t know what’s good for them” and that “liberty and freedom is necessary for a functioning society”. For example, insects is a pretty good source of nutrient and protein but is there anyone within a 100 miles from you that will willingly eat them daily? Even easier, we all know, deep down, that we could be doing something better, but how often do we rise up to that ideal?

Well, for one, this isn’t just a two-party ecosystem. It’s not just the consumer and Apple. It’s also the app developers. App developers are largely the ones pushing things like PWA. Apple’s long-standing heavy handed take on design standards has always been driven by a focus on consumer/end-user experience and it has often been chafed against by developers and more technical types. For instance- Apple rightly refused to allow flash and Java apps on iOS devices and I think my user experience was the better for it.

Users don't choose what they use, they use what they must. I can't choose to use Signal if everybody uses WhatsApp. I can't choose a non-ElectronJS Slack client because it doesn't exist.

If PWA is cheaper to make, companies will go there. Whether or not it's better for the users. Companies want to make money, not help users.

> Company wants to make money, not help users

Yea but Apple is a company too…

Good for them?

I am simply countering back what GP said about other companies cheapening out on features by stating that Apple is also a company. Yes, the point is that no company cares about you. Making customer happy is a side effect of them making money.

Too much Kool aid there. Apple values vertical integration and control of the OS. The fact that they do not allow users to set pink text on green background as the system default should not be taken as proof that most users prefer reading pink on green.

If users don't want crappy PWAs than they wont use them. It's common sense to let "the market decide" -- why not in this case?

Market decisions don’t do anything to prevent the tragedy of the commons - is the general answer. I have mixed opinions on this specific case, but I absolutely see how this could make things worse. If everyone starts releasing their own versions, and not offering the apps in the App Store anymore, than the people who prefer the walled garden (for which there are good reasons to want) then they lose that choice. It’s possible that doesn’t happen - and allowing people that don’t want the walled garden should also have that choice, but you can’t simply boil this complex question down to “free market”. It’s intellectually dishonest, at best.

And they don't. How come Android still has apps that are not PWAs?

They won’t have a choice. Low quality crap is cheaper to make so in a lot of cases that is all there will be.

in this specific case its Google decision, not whole market, Google is usurping web space and web standards

Counter-example: I don't want crappy ElectronJS apps, but I don't have a choice. Discord/Slack don't have an open API that would allow a good third-party client.

If I don't like PWAs but WhatsApp stops supporting anything else, how can I use WhatsApp without the PWA?

There are definitely too many crappy Electron apps out there, but at least WhatsApp have been working on a native macOS/iPad OS app for more than a year now. Last time I tried the beta, it wasn't really usable yet, but at least there is hope.

Nice! I'm always happy when companies make real native apps (in that case Electron can be kept as a fallback) :-).

What would be great would be for them to have some kind of API to let people write their own clients. Maybe there are big downsides with that (Loss of control? Having to keep backward compatibility?) but I don't really see them.

> It's common sense to let "the market decide" -- why not in this case?

Apple is the market here. If people wants to have PWAs they do not buy Apple products.

But in reality "the market decide" is not common sense - that is why we have regulations.

Because markets sometimes fail so it pays to be sure if that would or wouldn't happen. How many Android customers choose an app based on its API? What is the quality of the Android store? Why would it work differently for an Apple Store?

I see this argument often, but I'm genuinely curious if it's actually the case - at least in my experience, a huge amount of apps nowadays have custom-designed UIs and very little conformance to "platform UI conventions". And that's even an expectation - if you see an app that uses standard UI controls, navigation etc - it comes off as basic and probably not really polished. I might be completely wrong.

On the other side, if users want standard UI and that's a factor in adoption, wouldn't people making PWAs then just make the apps in such a way - there's nothing stopping them, and there's no lack of UI libraries enabling that.

> wouldn't people making PWAs then just make the apps in such a way

I'd say look at popular cross-platform frameworks, and tell me if you think that cross-platform apps generally look native. I don't.

Thanks, but no thanks. I prefer to make my own choice over others "care".

No thanks, freedom of choice should surpass UX in importance here.

So you're saying Apple knows what I like and what I don't ?

It should be my choice

Apple doesn’t know what you want and neither do you. Apple makes you want.

Nobody, least of all oneself, knows what one wants (except in the moment; I want some peanuts) so we have to be told. And you certainly do have a choice, so long as it’s the right one.

Apple knows what they think is good. It turns out lots of people agree or they wouldn’t be so successful.

You have a choice, if you don’t like it buy an Android phone. Or a Sailfish phone, or a KDE phone our one of the other open source phones where the only “apps” are low quality PWA crap. Look how successful they are.

> You have a choice, if you don’t like it buy an Android phone. Or a Sailfish phone, or a KDE phone our one of the other open source phones where the only “apps” are low quality PWA crap. Look how successful they are.

Do you think that's because of PWA UX being inherently crappy and not, say, the fact that those projects don't have billion (or trillion) USD companies behind them? I think you're mistaking the effect for the cause.

PWAs are a way of lowering the barrier of entry for new devs and that's important if you want to achieve any scale.

> You have a choice

It's kind of a like a thug saying that I have a choice between being slapped in the face, kicked in the butt or subscribing to his Twilight fanfic podcast. Yes, I do have a choice, but neither of the choices is really something I'm looking forward to. Betamax vs. VHS comes to mind too.

I think the line of thinking in the parent comment is a bit naive. There's nothing inherently wrong with PWAs from the UX pov if we take monopolies and FUD into account. That's the reason it is harder to build a PWA with really good UX now (harder but not impossible).

The fact that they're successful doesn't mean that they're right about every single decision they make. This kind of reasoning is inane.

I think the parent is mistaking the effect for the cause, and our choices as consumers are limited. Hence the choice often is the flavour of the lesser evil we're most comfortable with.

I want good PWAs. I don’t want borderline spyware-apps with access to all kinds of apis. There is no reason why a messaging app needs my gyro data, or gps, or all of the other stuff they just implicitly get because they are an app. I’m starting to think that some of the worst that ever happened was that Firefox OS failed.

How will PWAs prevent your messaging app from getting gps data?

A bad native app can require the gps permission, but a bad PWA app will be able to do the same, right?

They would be running in a browser, and you can just deny it getting location information, but in general, apps have access to much more raw data than a tab in the browser does. It's also possible, in theory, to run a PWA in a different browser which masks your information.

You can deny location data to a native app, can't you...

I really don't think that sandboxing is a good argument in favour of PWAs, honestly.

Games are an obvious example where platform UI conventions aren’t applicable, and where Apple’s restrictions hinder not just UX (see discoverability in the App Store) but also incentivise shitty monetisation practices.

Gaming on mobile friggen sucks and that is primarily because Apple wants to retain control and the biggest piece of the pie.

Gaming in mobile browsers, in 2023, should be as easily accessible as it were in desktop browser in the Flash days. Apple just won’t come to the table to facilitate a decent gaming experience in Safari.

Let’s also not forget Steve Jobs was all for web standards in his letter against Flash. Apple should make good on what was promised in that letter instead of dragging their feet.

https://newslang.ch/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Thoughts-on-F...

Gaming on mobile sucks because people voted with their $ that they prefer free to download, micro transaction laden games.

Are you trying to make the point that games would benefit from being web apps?

Just some anecdata: I use the Outlook PWA (on an iPhone!) to access my work mail and calendar. It does not have notifications, which I really liked for calendar events (because I’m forgetful), so that’s a bit sad. However, there is a decisive pro: It cannot enforce restrictive device policies. What a great feature!

UX isn’t half bad either. It actually feels pretty native most of the time.

iOS 16.4 added notification support for websites added to the home screen, does Microsoft need to make a change to use it?

I would certainly think so? The PWA currently does not contain anything about notifications.

Even on your run-off-the-mill desktop web browser, push notifications do not come “for free”. You need a service worker. You need a specific server implementation. It’s not just the Notification API.

On the other hand our IT recently blocked external sharing of calendars, which I'd used to gain read-only access to my work calendar on my private phone and I bloody hate it – by the time the browser and Outlook have loaded on my under-powered phone, I could have launched my calendar app ten times over, plus the work calendar is now no longer integrated with the system calendar APIs so it no longer appears on my homescreen calendar widget, I now I have to switch back and forth between separate apps for my private and my work calendar, offline access only works so-so and wastes additional space, etc. etc.

(Plus I don't want to actually deal with full Outlook because I have zero interest in accessing my work mail privately, whereas I do need to take a look at my work calendar in order to avoid accidentally double-booking myself.)

OK, so let people choose. They'll consistently choose native apps and PWAs will become second class.

It doesn't need Apple to white Knight on behalf of their poor, dim, uninformed users.

Because they're not.

Except if mainstream proprietary apps go to PWA. Just like I'm forced to use those damn ElectronJS apps. I wouldn't if I had a choice.

Aren't there a lot of "native apps" that just launch a webview though?

"Users" don't fall in one bucket. Me, I do want some PWA's, not least because Apple's prudish stance disallows anything sexual or adult on the App store.

Users mostly want the app features, the rest is secondary.