Yes, but people become untrustworthy very quickly.
It doesn't make any sense to them, so they distrust it. Especially because we had been encouraging the act of bookmarking our web app on the homescreen for years (since it works great for our use case! Offline access is possible, loads quickly, no worries of apple shutting us down, and it's as cross platform as it gets). Also the wording is difficult. Telling users to open this same page, but in safari is confusing, and they need to login again, and navigate to that page again.
Imagine if a website told you that if you had previously "bookmarked" their page in your desktop browser, that you had to remove the bookmark to use a feature. You'd be skeptical at the very least right? It's a strange request...
Not to mention that even detecting it is kind of broken. The feature looks like it's available (opposed to pre ios 11 where the functions didn't exist), but when you go to use them they throw a generic exception (which can mean anything from they are in the "added to homescreen" browser on ios, the camera randomly crashed on android, another app is currently using the camera, or it just didn't work for some unknown reason).
So we have to check for the nonstandard `navigator.standalone` property, then just assume it won't work for the user. If iOS 12 adds support for this, we will need to update our app again and remove this block, but only if they are on iOS 12...
That's kind of what I do when checking the `navigator.standalone` property, but it means I'm basically doing useragent sniffing by a different name, since if they fix this in iOS 12 I'll need to update my app so they can use it.
It doesn't make any sense to them, so they distrust it. Especially because we had been encouraging the act of bookmarking our web app on the homescreen for years (since it works great for our use case! Offline access is possible, loads quickly, no worries of apple shutting us down, and it's as cross platform as it gets). Also the wording is difficult. Telling users to open this same page, but in safari is confusing, and they need to login again, and navigate to that page again.
Imagine if a website told you that if you had previously "bookmarked" their page in your desktop browser, that you had to remove the bookmark to use a feature. You'd be skeptical at the very least right? It's a strange request...
Not to mention that even detecting it is kind of broken. The feature looks like it's available (opposed to pre ios 11 where the functions didn't exist), but when you go to use them they throw a generic exception (which can mean anything from they are in the "added to homescreen" browser on ios, the camera randomly crashed on android, another app is currently using the camera, or it just didn't work for some unknown reason).
So we have to check for the nonstandard `navigator.standalone` property, then just assume it won't work for the user. If iOS 12 adds support for this, we will need to update our app again and remove this block, but only if they are on iOS 12...
It's just a giant fucking mess.