Link tags: push

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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.

A pretty sweet push notification solution for mobile Safari

An entire generation of apps-that-should-have-been web pages has sprung up, often shoehorned into supposedly cross-platform frameworks that create a subpar user experience sludge. Nowhere is this more true than for media — how many apps from newspapers or magazines have you installed, solely for a very specific purpose like receiving breaking news alerts? How many of those apps are just wrappers around web views? How many of those apps should have been web pages?

Web Push on iOS requires installing the web app - Webventures

Instead of doing what the competing browsers are doing (and learning from years of experience of handling Web Push), Apple decided to reinvent a wheel here. What they’ve turned up with looks a lot more like a square.

The Biggest Thing from WWDC 2022 - Webventures

Web Push on iOS will change the “we need to build a native app” decision.

I agree.

Push notifications are definitely not the sole reason to go native, but in my experience, it’s one of the first things clients ask for. They may very well be the thing that pushes your client over the edge and forces them, you and the entire project to accept the logic of the app store model.

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.

PushAPI without Notifications | Seblog

Remember when I wrote about using push without notifications? Sebastiaan has written up the details of the experiment he conducted at Indie Web Camp Berlin.

Push and ye shall receive | CSS-Tricks

Imagine a PWA podcast app that works offline and silently receives and caches new podcasts. Sweet. Now we need a permissions model that allows for silent notifications.

Web Push Notifications Demo | Microsoft Edge Demos

Push notifications explained using astrology. But don’t worry, there’s also some code, just in case you prefer your explanations to also include models that actually work.

Sessions by Pusher

Oodles and oodles of videos of talks from London developer meetups.

PushCrew Push Notifications for HTTP websites

A nasty service that Harry noticed in his role as chronicler of dark patterns—this exploits the way that browser permissions are presented below the line of death.

Modernizing our Progressive Enhancement Delivery | Filament Group, Inc., Boston, MA

Scott runs through the latest improvements to the Filament Group website. There’s a lot about HTTP2, but also a dab of service workers (using a similar recipe to my site).

A Tale of Four Caches · Yoav Weiss

A cute explanation of different browser caches:

  • memory cache,
  • service worker cache,
  • disk cache, and
  • push cache.

Twitter Engineering: Implementing pushState for twitter.com

A really nice explanation by Todd Kloots of Twitter’s use of progressive enhancement with Ajax and the HTML5 History API. There’s even a shout for Hijax in there.

20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web

A delightful online book that makes excellent use of HTML5's history API.

The Pushbutton Web: Realtime Becomes Real - Anil Dash

Anil Dash writes about the realtime web, calling it Pushbutton.