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Comment by derefr

5 years ago

I would point out that the article you linked mentions that webapps "added to the home screen" on iOS Mobile Safari are exempt from this garbage-collection process. In such a case, the "add to the home screen" step is being taken as the user expressing the explicit desire to have that data around indefinitely. Which seems sensible to me; webapps should be treated as ephemeral-by-default, and only be allowed persistent storage if the user goes to lengths (i.e. beyond just clicking "Accept" on a modal) to express their desire to keep the data.

(And also, I've observed that webapps that notice they're on an iOS device can insist on being "added to the home screen" before they'll do anything, and so ensure their data stays around.)

The problematic aspect of this, is that there's no equivalent of this "exemption by user explicitly expressing the desire to keep the app around" for non-mobile Safari.

Maybe for desktop Safari, the data should be kept around if the web app's rel="canonical" URL is bookmarked in the browser?

Or desktop Safari could just support regular Progressive Web App standards, and so show an "Install App" indicator (like e.g. desktop Chrome does for this webapp: https://www.soundslice.com/). But I have a feeling Apple will never support this on desktop...

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derefr

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tarsinge  5 years ago

PWA are not a standard, they are a Google concept pushed through Chrome (OS). I’m fine with Apple never supporting it.

  • monocasa  5 years ago

    PWA is a Google term, but the whole web app thing is older than even the native app store on iPhone.

    • BadInformatics  5 years ago

      Google may have coined the term (not sure about this), but it's far from their own thing [1]. PWA should've been a blanket term for a set of standards and guidelines for developing web apps. Those include progressive enhancement, which I don't think most people would expect.

      Unfortunately, the term has been co-opted to mean "website I can install/pin as an app". Again, Google is probably to blame for this, but AFAICT it was never meant to be the meaning of the term. What it does do is create misunderstandings, like a sibling thread claiming that (desktop) Firefox doesn't support PWAs because you can't install anything.

      [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...

      1 reply →

arthurcolle  5 years ago

I wish these bookmarks extended to other browsers on iOS. It's already crazy they can't ship custom rendering engines, but basically this in and of itself could be considered anticompetitive (only Safari bookmarks can be exempted from this GC process) lol!

  • ricardobeat  5 years ago

    I think all home screen apps run on the system webview, there are no “safari bookmarks” in this context.

    • arthurcolle  5 years ago

      you can only add bookmarks from the home screen from Safari. Chrome, Firefox, etc do not have this capability