A PWA on iOS is just a cached web page. Safari remains pretty crippled with regards to the APIs (bluetooth, usb, filesystem, etc...) that make local apps attractive in the first place. Apple is fine with letting people cache web pages, they're not fine with stuff that might displace the app store.

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epistasis 10 hours ago | parent [-]

And for that I'm quite thankful, if all the stuff that apps could do were possible on the web it would make the web a far far scarier place than it is.

I avoid apps as much as possible due to all the nefarious tricks they play, even with all the sandboxing and review they go through. Without those constraints, I can't imagine the hell that we'd be in.

	▲	ajross 10 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Which is fine, for the 90% of people that spend their time on the 70% of common features and interact only with the screen and headphones and internet. But sometimes people like to do stuff like configure their QMK keyboards or load new firmware for their EdgeTX drone radios or make bootable USB sticks, all tasks that work just fine in easily deployed PWAs on every client platform in existence, except iOS. For small developers of small-yet-oddball clients apps, PWA's are an absolutely magnificent platform. Write once, deploy once, run... everywhere-but-an-iPhone. It really sucks that Apple's devices are crippled like this. Edit to reply to this bit: > Without those constraints, I can't imagine the hell that we'd be in. Again, that hell is literally every other platform on the planet. It's only Safari that is "protected". In point of fact browser permissions management on this stuff tends strongly to be stricter and less permissive than app permissions, which are much less visible.
	▲	iknowstuff 10 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Not really, as long as they need permission granted