PWA is suddenly dead?

Imagine you are a restaurant owner running reactive.place. Your waiters are probably using PWA version - it enables push notifications so that you are immediately notified whenever there is a request on some table. All good until suddenly Apple is killing iOS PWA entirely in the EU. Frustrating, isn’t it?

Consequences

Needless to say that it renders PWA in EU practically unusable - why would a business invest into PWA when it no longer covers all the platforms? It means we can no longer just stick to a web standard, we need to develop custom notification delivery system just to cover iOS.

I actually had some faith when Apple started to adhere to a web standard for push notifications in the latest versions of Safari, but all of that was false hopes.

I’m not writing this post to discuss reasons why Apple is doing it. I’m simply saying that it hurts a lot of people. They consider it a small percentage of their users, completely forgetting about developers, businesses and standards that bring value to those users.

Recently at my job I prepared a technical proposal for a client, and their use-case was ideal for PWA. We established technologies, scopes, milestones and other relevant information. Few days later Apple publishes the news. When the client has reviewed the proposal and it was time for a call, my first question was if he is based in EU or not. Luckily the business will be operating in the US, so this change does not affect them. Otherwise they would’ve lost an opportunity to save a whole bunch of time and money.

Another client we developed a PWA for, is luckily operating in Hong-Kong, also dodging these limitations. Imagine if they were in the EU - having a working app live for a couple of weeks, getting first users and suddenly realizing that now they need to rebuild most of the application.

I hope something changes about this, because this shows that users have absolutely no control over what apps, technologies and standards they can use.