You're being unrealistic. The app not opening in a standalone window is a major change to the intended experience, and makes what can be, and was in a lot of cases, an experience equal to that of a native app no better than a web page from the early 10s.

Very much this.

Apples move here is a very clear attempt to break UX via affecting UI in a negative fashion, and also takes away a key function that is to be expected of some apps (push notifications). This is very obviously and rather transparently a move to preserve their income stream via the walled garden that is the app store.

This move additionally hurts developers. Developing a PWA is far simpler from a multi platform perspective since you're effectively building a responsive full screen website, and instead if you wish to preserve the full screen experience of your users on Apple devices you will.now need to pursue something which compiles to native code - meaning not your PWA. You've at least doubled your overhead development costs in most circumstances.

I find opening in a standalone app to be a far worse experience than a web page. PWAs seem like such a downgrade to me: no url bar, no forward/back, no bookmarks, usually no tabs or maybe limited tabs, extension buttons & awesome bar are gone...

PWAs recreate a modality that offers less. I would rather have the affordances of a user ahent available.

As a user, I wish my user agent would let me un-standalone PWAs & bring them back to the web. Especially as we start to create permissions like Direct Sockets which are gated on PWAs.

Yes, it's the usual "nudging" - annoy people slightly, but enough, to direct them in Apple's beneficial direction.

> Most web apps are already only used in the browser, so almost all web apps will continue to work the same as before.

Citation needed for this assertion that almost all web apps are not installed, merely used in browser.

No, I don’t think a citation is needed for the assertion that most web apps are used in web browsers. There are places where “citation needed” is a useful thing to say; this is not one of them.

"almost all web apps" != most web apps.

Reread my comment, that wasn’t the claim. There were two claims here:

I said most web apps are used in web browsers. I said almost all web apps will continue to work. It looks like you mixed up the first claim with the second.

There are three types of web app to consider:

1. Web apps that aren’t PWAs, that are just used in the browser. These are the norm. These will continue to work unaffected because they were never installed to the home screen anyway. No change in behaviour at all.

2. PWAs that support being installed or being used in a web browser. Among PWAs, these are also the norm. You don’t know whether a new user has installed your app or not, and you want it to work regardless, so that’s how you code it. These will also continue to work, because they already work in Safari, so being opened in Safari isn’t going to break them. Some graceful degradation may occur, depending upon the web app in question. For instance, a web app might optionally support push notifications when installed, but still work without push notifications when used in a web browser.

3. PWAs that only work when they are installed but not when they are used in a web browser. These are a minority, even amongst PWAs. The change will break these.

When I say most web apps are used in web browsers, I am referring to 1. When I say almost all web apps will continue to work, I am referring to 1+2.

The article uses “all web apps” to refer to 3. This is the dishonesty. “Web apps” are 1 + 2 + 3, not the extreme minority of 3 alone. Apple aren’t “breaking all web apps”, Apple are specifically breaking what I describe in 3.

I’ve raised this with OWA before, and they said that their target audience are regulators who would get confused otherwise. I don’t think this is truthful. I think they are sacrificing honesty in order to be more inflammatory.

We use web apps to mean ones that act like apps, rather than websites.

Readers are not confused, and I don’t think you are. A distraction to try and defend Apple?

“Act like apps” is far too nebulous and obscures what we are actually talking about. Let’s see what we can agree on. How about these two statements:

1. The only web apps that can possibly be affected at all by this change are ones that are installed to the home screen and used in that way.

2. It is not possible for web apps that are currently used in a browser to be affected by this change.

I don’t think you can disagree with these two statements can you? So how can you make the claim that Apple are going to break all web apps?

Or are you explicitly denying that a “web app” is something you can use in a web browser, and you define it only as something that must be installed to the home screen to work?

> 1. The only web apps that can possibly be affected at all by this change are ones that are installed to the home screen and used in that way.

Untrue. Also affected are ones that /may/ be installed that way.

> 2. It is not possible for web apps that are currently used in a browser to be affected by this change.

Untrue. Such apps that /may/ be used outside browser are affected.

> Reread my comment

Done. It says "so".

"Most web apps are already only used in the browser, so almost all web apps will continue to work the same as before."

> There were two claims here: I said most web apps are used in web browsers. I said almost all web apps will continue to work.

You've dropped the word "so".

> When I say most web apps are used in web browsers, I am referring to 1. When I say almost all web apps will continue to work, I am referring to 1+2.

Thanks for that amendment.

> “Web apps” are 1 + 2 + 3, not the extreme minority of 3 alone.

Citation needed for "extreme minority".

I don’t think the entire article is dishonest. I do think the headline is sensationalist though (as you described).

The majority of the article discusses the home screen issue specifically.

Regardless, as someone who builds PWAs in Europe specifically for iOS this is extremely disappointing. It’s a cynical move by Apple and I appreciate this site raising the point as I didn’t see it mentioned anywhere.

what about the data which is deleted after 7 days?

imagining all my native apps to loose their login and local settings is beyond acceptable.

I hope this is one of those lies in the article that you’re talking about.

>PWAs installed to the home screen will no longer open as individual apps

But that's the whole point of a PWA that you install to the home screen.

I think it is perfectly fine to get angry at Apple in this case because the change is only in the EU...

As much as I disagree with what Apple is doing here, you're absolutely right.

Not all PWAs are web apps.

Saying "Apple is going to break all web apps" is clickbaity and will only harm this initiative.

I will add that PWAs have been a failure for end users. Almost nobody installs web apps in the home screen.

My phone runs Android and I never install web apps on the home screen or want notifications or push notifications from a web app on my phone. For a time I used Twitter's PWA but they simply didn't pay much attention to it and ended up switching to the native app.

PWAs in principle are great and had great potential but Apple succeeded in killing those by not providing first-class support on iOS and iPadOS. Nobody is going to invest in a web app if it can't run on an iPhone.