I don't think that's right. Apple are consistently late to the party as far as Safari goes. I mean, they don't even support web push notifications yet, while other browsers have been supporting them for years. It's down right annoying.
I'd say there's a difference between a 'web site' and a 'web app'. If there's a web app for which you'd allow notifications if it was a native app, why wouldn't you do so for the web app?
Because every single website I visit today on my desktop shows me a popup asking me to enable their desktop notifications.
Nah, useless functionality. I've got feedly if I'd like to keep track of their news.
That being said I work in ad arbitrage, so I understand the presumed efficiency of these notifications. As they say our business is middle-aged Americans who can't use the Internet.
> Because every single website I visit today on my desktop shows me a popup asking me to enable their desktop notifications.
I know what you mean, but that's usually traditional news sites and the like. Having the Spotify web app notify you of the currently playing song or a remainder app reminding you of an appointment is of course a different case, Hence the "web site" vs "web app" distinction I made.
I don’t know: frankly I find them incredibly annoying (that includes Spotify, email and the likes).
But besides the point: imo the semantics of these notifications severely differ between applications. Moreover, the usefullness of them heavily depends on the ability for someone to integrate them in the whole ecosystem.
Thus notifications from news websites fit right in: they don’t need a snooze button as it in for OS X Calendar app. But they are the least useful.
So we are back to square one: if you allow notifications, then what kind of? Do you allow any HTML payloads or only some?
That being said my reply is re. subj.: I understand why Apple doesn’t like them. Because they are generally useful only for a small amount of use-cases, 99% of which is spam. And an average user is going to blame Apple for allowing him to accept them in the first place.
But all that is very much true for native app notifications as well. So it may be that you don't like notifications in general, not PWA notifications specifically?
Just because you don't like something doesn't mean it's not useful to other people. Case in point: my mom and a lot of her friends don't know how to use smartphones, or don't have one at all. But they like to stay connected with people on Facebook. The problem is, they hardly ever go to Facebook specifically, so the chrome notifications are very useful for them.
I think it's laughable that you differentiate between the notifications of an app vs the notifications from a web app. Both are opt-in, with web apps being even more explicit about the opt-in process, in my opinion. Also, once you disallow notifications, the web app will not be able to request permissions again. Why do you feel this is problematic?
It's easy to disable notifications for native apps (on iOS at least) - just don't grant the permission in the first place.
The reason I feel web notifications are more problematic is the nagging aspect that I think would happen (like, for example, the 'install our app' interstitials and prompts). That's annoying enough without adding notifications to the mix.
I sort of agree with you. The web is the wild west, reckless and unrestricted. The app stores are considerably more tame, yet intrinsically restrictive in many ways. Eventually we will tame the web app/PWA ecosystem, while keeping things much more flexible than the app stores. I agree some aspects of PWAs are a little rough round the edges (as you described), but there is plenty of polishing ongoing, and I bet PWAs will eventually emerge shinier than their native counterparts.
