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| ▲ | afavour a day ago | parent | next [-] | | There’s a whole API that the browser provides to prompt users to install: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/befo... | | |
| ▲ | tpmoney a day ago | parent [-] | | I’m not sure one can say Apple is intentionally making it difficult to install a web app to the Home Screen because they haven’t implemented a draft proposal to the w3c working group that proposes a spec only chrome has implemented and no other browser except chrome and its derivatives supports. | | |
| ▲ | goosejuice a day ago | parent [-] | | https://mashable.com/article/apple-reverses-decision-home-sc... Yes one can. They got greedy. https://williamkennedy.ninja/apple/2024/01/30/steve-jobs-int... | | |
| ▲ | indidjdjendk a day ago | parent [-] | | Yes and no. “Add to Home Screen” living on the share menu is as insane as “Find on Page” living there. Which both do. And I don’t think there’s a master plan behind “find on page” being tucked away bafflingly on the share button. It’s just bad UX. No conspiracy here. | | |
| ▲ | goosejuice a day ago | parent [-] | | It's not a conspiracy that they once promoted PWAs as being the future and then reversed course so far as to removing the ability completely. | | |
| ▲ | tpmoney a day ago | parent [-] | | They only removed it completely in a jurisdiction where they were being told that they had to open all of their internal APIs around web applications to all comers if they were going to use those APIs in their own applications. They claimed (whether you believe them or not) that doing so would open risks they didn’t want to take and so they removed it in that jurisdiction. If this was some grand plan to stop the few hundred PWAs out there entirely, one would think they would have removed the PWA functionality in other less hostile jurisdictions where no law makers were looking to force a change. I could absolutely believe that the security risks were overblown, but if the assertion is Apple is trying to suppress PWAs, they’re doing a pretty bad job of it given they could just turn it off in the US and no one would blink an eye. | | |
| ▲ | goosejuice a day ago | parent [-] | | Both of you are conflating conspiracy with incentives. They have no incentive to promote a distribution model outside of the confines of the app store where they make all their money. | | |
| ▲ | tpmoney a day ago | parent [-] | | Sure I agree they have no incentive to promote them. But your claim wasn’t that they don’t promote them. You claimed that they’re making them exceedingly difficult to install. Apparently because they put the command for that in a consistent menu position for decades and removing the functionality temporarily in a single jurisdiction. If they wanted to make it “exceedingly difficult” they could be disabling it in all jurisdictions, or hide it behind layers of developer mode dialogs and warnings. They could remove the instructions for how to do so from the on device help. They could require you to re-pin it every 3 days like they do for self loaded apps. They could stop adding support for newer PWA APIs as new ones get standardized and they could deprecate and remove APIs that already exist. We all know Apple isn’t precious about backwards compatibility. If the goal is to make using a PWA “exceedingly difficult” Apple is failing miserably despite being very successful at making side-loading apps “exceedingly difficult” | | |
| ▲ | goosejuice a day ago | parent [-] | | > “exceedingly difficult” Who are you quoting? But sure call me crazy for thinking it's user hostile to put install / add to home 5 taps deep into the menu. That has nothing to do with supporting a 2015 web API. They would go on to add smart app banners to promote native app store apps instead. Edit: didn't realize smart app banner was 2012 | | |
| ▲ | tpmoney a day ago | parent [-] | | I apologize, it does seem like I misread and added the qualifier, you just claimed they made it “difficult”. My mistake. But I still disagree that it is “difficult” or “user hostile” to put the command to add a web app to your Home Screen 3 (not 5) taps away. Menu -> submenu -> command is not user hostile or difficult. The command is in the same place as all the other “do something with this page” commands. It’s not hidden behind toggles, it’s not buried in submenus away from other similar actions, it’s not in its own menu or an activity you have to leave safari for and initiate from the Home Screen instead. It takes just as many taps to change to a specific tab as it does to save a PWA |
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| ▲ | goosejuice a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Have you ever tried communicating this to consumers of a web app? Our android customers get a nice little install popup or a push of a button.. it's pretty seamless. With TWA it's also trivial to put it on the play store. | |
| ▲ | bel8 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | How is "share" intuitive here? I want to pin the app, not share. That seems purposefully misplaced. As usual with malicious compliance. In Android: Menu > Install and create shortcut. Much cleaner, intentional, and visible with a single click for me. | | |
| ▲ | tpmoney a day ago | parent | next [-] | | It’s intuitive in as much as anything on smart phones is, because the share menu is the OS mechanism for sending data from any iOS app to somewhere else. You use the same menu to save a file to Dropbox, put a photo into a note, add a bookmark etc. Effectively if you want to take something that lives in an app and have it live somewhere else, you use the share menu. | | |
| ▲ | bel8 a day ago | parent [-] | | You're not sending any "data" though, much less sharing anything. I just asked my colleague and they had no clue how to do it in their iPhone. I guess a win for Apple. | | |
| ▲ | tpmoney a day ago | parent [-] | | Did your colleague even know that such a thing was possible at all, because it’s been in the share menu pretty much since day one. Sure it could be put somewhere else but it’s also been in a consistent spot for generations of iPhones, and the built in help app/manual will tell you how to do it if you don’t know how. If you want to argue the menu should be renamed, you won’t get any argument from me. But a poorly
named menu is bad for initial discovery, but it does nothing to make the actual process any more difficult. The claim wasn’t that Apple put it in a poorly named menu, or that the share menu is bad UX in general. The claim was that iOS users can’t pin web apps because Apple made it “exceedingly difficult” to do so. A 3 click navigation through the standard menus that has been consistent for multiple generations and is documented in the on-device help doesn’t qualify as “exceedingly difficult” |
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| ▲ | isleyaardvark a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | It’s been under “Share” since before the term “Progressive Web App” was coined. |
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