Comment by fidotron

2 days ago

This is interesting for two reasons, firstly because the reason Chrome on Android has such terrible push notification latency is claimed to be the need to run the service worker in the context of the Chrome application, which being huge would use a load of battery so they avoid running it if at all possible.

Secondly, unfortunately the problem with iOS Safari notifications is once you get them working they cannot do things like group properly or replace each other. It just becomes a horrifying flood until you clear them all. If they have made iOS respect the tag and action fields, which are conspicuous by absence from their examples, then it will be game on.

I hope this is a sign that this is finally going to be working one day.

5 comments

fidotron

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littlecranky67  2 days ago

> Secondly, unfortunately the problem with iOS Safari notifications is once you get them working they cannot do things like group properly or replace each other

Can you elaborate? I runa PWA on my iPhone and once the PWA is installed ("added to home screen") you can manage the notification display (grouping, lockscreen, temporary/persistent) just as with any other app installed via the iPhone Settings -> Notifications.

Replacing previous notifications is not possible in the web-push standard at all, so it is not apple to blame.

  • fidotron  2 days ago

    It totally is: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Notificatio...

    "The idea of notification tags is that more than one notification can share the same tag, linking them together. One notification can then be programmatically replaced with another to avoid the users' screen being filled up with a huge number of similar notifications."

    Apple are the only ones not supporting this, and much of the time with web stuff they have a point, but this one just seems obtuse.

    • littlecranky67  2 days ago

      You are right, wasn't aware of it. Looks like Chrome didn't implement this either. I'm not an android user, but to be fair, there is no way Notifications can be grouped like this on iOS with native apps.

    • threeseed  2 days ago

      Apple groups notifications using on their on-device AI.

      So even if it was supported the OS would just ignore it.

om2  2 days ago

In Safari 18.4 (currently in beta) tags are supported and notifications can replace each other.