> Apple's ban of all browsers but Safari turned out to be the main barrier preventing progressive web apps from being viable, deepening the duopoly power of themselves and Google, because Apple refuses to implement basic browser standards that are necessary for PWAs.
I don't know if this is substantially true. When I hear of PWA features that people complain about, they are almost always things that Google Chrome as its own app with its own web engine can't add to the underlying OS, such as:
- robust background processing
- background push notifications
- new video codecs (on a power-constrained device)
- system-wide protocol handlers
- web bluetooth/webUSB/webNFC
- adding their own new synthetic "app" representing the PWA to the Home Screen.
Many of the things people talk about with PWAs are not anything close to a web "standard" or even a recommendation - Google implemented them, because they were pressured internally to make a web-based programming environment for Chromebooks.
I don't know if this is substantially true. When I hear of PWA features that people complain about, they are almost always things that Google Chrome as its own app with its own web engine can't add to the underlying OS, such as:
- robust background processing
- background push notifications
- new video codecs (on a power-constrained device)
- system-wide protocol handlers
- web bluetooth/webUSB/webNFC
- adding their own new synthetic "app" representing the PWA to the Home Screen.
Many of the things people talk about with PWAs are not anything close to a web "standard" or even a recommendation - Google implemented them, because they were pressured internally to make a web-based programming environment for Chromebooks.
> [1] https://developer.apple.com/notifications/safari-push-notifi...
Both macOS and iOS have honest-to-goodness push notification support now.