Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web
I think a lot of commenters here are missing the point and getting distracted by push notifications (who wants a website spamming them with notifications?) and loading screens (hardly a feature).<p>Apple supporting PWA (Progressive Web Apps) is hugely important because it enables a future where web apps can natively support browser, Mac&#x2F;Windows&#x2F;Linux desktop, and mobile iPhone&#x2F;Android&#x2F;Windows native mobile with a single codebase of open technologies.<p>Why is that important? By fragmenting development effort, the overall product isn&#x27;t as good on any platform.<p>There&#x27;s an app I&#x27;m making on the side to keep track of your contacts (like a personal customer management system). This needs to store all your contacts offline, because it&#x27;d be too much friction to load everyone you&#x27;ve ever taken notes on over the network every time you open the app.<p>Right now, the only way for me to accomplish that on iOS is to make a native app. This means I had to learn an entirely new technology stack (React Native and XCode), completely rewrite my views, tie everything into my backend, and go through Apple&#x27;s Byzantine approval process (which I still haven&#x27;t done because I can&#x27;t figure out why my app compiles and runs locally but complains about libraries not being linked when I try to archive it to upload to the app store).<p>This is unnecessary duplication of work that could&#x27;ve been spent writing new features, makes it harder to add new front-end features in the future (because now they have to be added in two places), and adds a huge lag in the time it takes me to push changes to the iOS client (weeks, vs. the seconds it takes to push a change to the web client).<p>If apple supported PWA, I would&#x27;ve spent my time making the database keep a local syncing copy on the browser (with minimongo or pouchdb), and then <i>every platform</i> would&#x27;ve benefited from faster page loads and offline syncing.<p>Until Apple adds PWA support, I can&#x27;t make as good stuff, and people can&#x27;t use the better stuff.