Web Push for Web Apps on iOS and iPadOS
A personal gripe with progressive web apps: they cache the website!!<p>A lot of people have requested that I make a progressive web app for <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plaintextsports.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plaintextsports.com</a>. I&#x27;ve looked into it, but it fundamentally doesn&#x27;t work, because it caches the home page. My website doesn&#x27;t load any data via JavaScript; it just relies on the HTML page updating every 30 seconds, so when the home page is cached, the website just stops working.<p>I don&#x27;t want this service worker nonsense. In most cases offline access isn&#x27;t useful; people want the live scores. (It&#x27;d be moderately useful for viewing schedules offline, but I think most people use it for live scores.) I just want the website to show up as its own app in the app switcher, and basically <i>nothing</i> else to change: I still want the swipe-to-go-back gesture to still work. I still want the address bar with the manual refresh button. But I can&#x27;t do that.<p>It&#x27;s frustrating that they&#x27;ve provided a way to make a certain style of websites into first-class apps, but it doesn&#x27;t work for the most basic websites!!<p>Side note: this is partially a the-best-way-to-get-a-question-answered-on-the-internet-is-to-say-something-wrong post. If there&#x27;s a way to make it a PWA and not have all the pages heavily cached, please let me know! I would love to be wrong on this. (Unfortunately my noprocast just triggered though, so I won&#x27;t be able to edit this post or respond for the next three hours.)