Your logic is not aligned with my own. I visit a thousand websites a month and never return to most of them that month, if ever. I use the same fifty apps each month.
One thousand notification prompts, one for each site I visit, is unacceptable.
Fifty notification prompts, one for each time I open an app for the first time on my phone, is acceptable.
You’ve only addressed the single-site case, not the at-scale reality that we users face when browsing HN or Google News or any other content aggregator that links out to a near-infinite array of sites.
My browser is for the open web. My phone is for native apps. I’m aware this is upsetting to proponents of PWAs, but it’s not because of technological limitations that I feel this way. It’s because websites target the lowest common denominator, and I don’t have time for that on mobile.
I can barely stand to use HN on mobile, it’s so awful, it doesn’t honor my OS-wide text settings, it has a horrendous text area, it ignores system color palettes, it doesn’t support OS dark mode hints. HN consciously chooses to target browsers only and does not wish to target being an app, and so I have modified my browser to adapt the website to be tolerable to me. But HN does not deserve to exist on my phone as-is outside of my browser.
Very few websites put in the level of effort to deserve to be called an “app”, and my views reflect their disregard for per-platform integration. (Similarly, I loathe apps that are just a website in a shim, and I tolerate them as minimally as necessary for banking and medical purposes, and tolerate none in my everyday use.)
> One thousand notification prompts, one for each site I visit, is unacceptable.
That's a slippery slope argument. Apple could very well require the PWA to be installed first before allowing it to send notifications, and make the install button non-intrusive.
Interesting. You and I visit very different websites if you get that many permission prompts. The worst offenders in my experience are low-effort tech blogs I encounter when Googling an error message.
According to my Firefox settings, I've given notification access to about 50% of the websites that requested it. I certainly visit a lot of different sites, usually linked from aggregators and social media such as HN, Reddit and Twitter.
We can both have our ways. Allow for an easy way to disable the prompts permanently, perhaps even in a popup after installation, and we can all go our merry way.
My enjoyment of PWAs basically comes down to the fact that the browser acts as an extra sandbox that I control. I can install addons that change bad behaviours and block tracking resources and I can safely run and update them without risking exposing too much information. I mainly use them for things I run myself (Home Assistant is a big one there), weather apps (Buienalarm) and forums where I want a notification if someone replies to my messages directly. They're the applications that are just interactive enough that a static website wouldn't suffice, but not interactive enough that I want to download an application for them.
One example is Youtube: if Google put in some effort, the entire app would only serve as a downloading and caching platform. Browsers are good at playing video. They're good at simple like/dislike interactions, and they're good at making comments. Yet for some obscure reason, the website is janky and difficult to use, forcing people to use their apps with all of its native code and unnecessary bells and whistles. There shouldn't be a need for the browser to do any serious Javascript work unless you watch 3D/360° video, and even that is uncommon enough that running the code in JS would be good enough. There are rich web video platforms out there with the same basic feature set; many of them in the adult entertainment industry, because of Apple's and Google's unwillingness to platform them, but also outside of it on platforms like Floatplane and its competitors.
Youtube should be a PWA or maybe even a website, not a full-blown app. Sadly, the web version of Youtube is neither of those things.
The lack of these features make Safari, and in some cases even Firefox, simply insufficient for my use cases. I hate Chrome but I started to use these features when Chrome and Edge (pre-Edgium) made their way to implement PWAs and Firefox went the same direction; I expected FF to just take their time, not reject the concept all together.
I actually like HN's clarity and simplicity and it's lack of the barely function rich text editor JS mess. Perhaps dark mode CSS would be a nice feature, but it's not that important to me. I despise blog platforms such as medium that pretend to be apps when they're really just shitty websites.
Our preferences seem to be the exact opposite of each other's, and that's fine. I do't want to impose my preferred way of working on you by forcing things like notifications and other permission prompts onto you, which is why I'm a fierce proponent of easy and clear methods to disable any potentially unwanted functionality.
Opt-out rather than opt-in is a philosophical issue at the core of many concerns. I simply don’t think the open web deserves opt-out access to my notifications. Websites need to step it up and become apps if they want me to risk my time on their notifications, and if they choose not to, so be it.
Some websites won't or can't become apps because of app store rules, especially on iOS. That's why the web is seen by many as a way out, and why iOS web developers in particular seem to be such aggressive proponents of adding more PWA features.
Even an app following all standards can get refused by Apple's app review and there's no recourse other than to retry and hope this time the reviewer does their job right. Code using several open source licenses can't be uploaded to the Apple App store for legal reasons and there's no way around that either.
I think the web does deserve opt-in methods to access to many features, and I'd even like some features (like WebGL or WebGPU) to be behind additional permissions. Same with <canvas> features, most websites don't need that and it's mostly used for stalking me.
In a perfect world, Google would be able to put a real version of Chrome onto iOS and Mozilla would be able to do the same for Firefox, that way everyone could get what they wanted. The PWA enthusiasts could get a PWA-capable browser, the rest could stick to Safari with all of its quirks. That's not going to happen any time soon, though.
One thousand notification prompts, one for each site I visit, is unacceptable.
Fifty notification prompts, one for each time I open an app for the first time on my phone, is acceptable.
You’ve only addressed the single-site case, not the at-scale reality that we users face when browsing HN or Google News or any other content aggregator that links out to a near-infinite array of sites.
My browser is for the open web. My phone is for native apps. I’m aware this is upsetting to proponents of PWAs, but it’s not because of technological limitations that I feel this way. It’s because websites target the lowest common denominator, and I don’t have time for that on mobile.
I can barely stand to use HN on mobile, it’s so awful, it doesn’t honor my OS-wide text settings, it has a horrendous text area, it ignores system color palettes, it doesn’t support OS dark mode hints. HN consciously chooses to target browsers only and does not wish to target being an app, and so I have modified my browser to adapt the website to be tolerable to me. But HN does not deserve to exist on my phone as-is outside of my browser.
Very few websites put in the level of effort to deserve to be called an “app”, and my views reflect their disregard for per-platform integration. (Similarly, I loathe apps that are just a website in a shim, and I tolerate them as minimally as necessary for banking and medical purposes, and tolerate none in my everyday use.)