PWA asset generator based on Puppeteer.

Web Push on iOS - 1 year anniversary - Webventures

Web Push on iOS is nearing its one year anniversary. It’s still mostly useless.

Sad, but true. And here’s why:

On iOS, for a website to be able to ask the user to grant the push notification permission, it needs to be installed to the home screen.

No other browser on any of the other platforms requires you to install a website for it to be able to send push notifications.

Apple is within their rights to withhold Web Push to installed apps. One could argue it’s not even an unreasonable policy - if Apple made installing a web app at least moderately straightforward. As it is, they have buried it and hidden important functionality behind it.

I really, really hope that the Safari team are reading this.

It’s Time to Build a Progressive Web App. Here’s How – The New Stack

Much as I appreciate the optimism of this evaluation, I don’t hold out much hope that people’s expectations are going to change any time soon:

Indeed, when given a choice, users will opt for the [native] app version of a platform because it’s been considered the gold standard for reliability. With progressive web apps (PWAs), that assumption is about to change.

Nonetheless, this is a level-headed look at what a progressive web app is, mercifully free of hand-waving:

• App is served through HTTPS.
• App has a web app manifest with at least one icon. (We’ll talk more about the manifest shortly.)
• App has a registered service worker with a fetch event handler. (More on this later too.)

News from WWDC22: WebKit Features in Safari 16 Beta | WebKit

Good news and bad news…

The good news is that web notifications are coming to iOS—my number one wish!

The bad news is that it won’t happen until next year sometime.

Add support for defining a theme color for both light & dark modes (prefers color scheme)

There’s a good discussion here (kicked off by Jen) about providing different theme-color values in a web app manifest to match prefers-color-scheme in media queries.

Works offline

How do we tell our visitors our sites work offline? How do we tell our visitors that they don’t need an app because it’s no more capable than the URL they’re on right now?

Remy expands on his call for ideas on branding websites that work offline with a universal symbol, along the lines of what we had with RSS.

What I’d personally like to see as an outcome: some simple iconography that I can use on my own site and other projects that can offer ambient badging to reassure my visitor that the URL they’re visiting will work offline.