> Assuming you and your users are okay with pushing an 'okay I'm willing to sacrifice some battery life for this' button
This is the fundamental difference in philosophies behind Android and iOS.
Apple likes to build their software (most of the time) like Python - its an opinionated platform that strives to make that best decisions for users. They've determined there's very little user benefit from having multiple push notification services, and they don't want to give users a way to shoot themselves in the foot by enabling such a setting that would impact battery life like that.
Many of Apple's decisions can be viewed through that lense.
> This is genuinely tricky due to battery life and data usage considerations.
Which isn't really any of Apples business if I want to make that sacrifice, but rather something they can promote as a win by using their solution if it turns out that alternative push notification services implement it poorly.
> Surely Apple could implement a setting to disable all requests for push notifications?
That’s an option in macOS. Ultimately it doesn’t make the UX any better though, as web developers still present JS-based dialogs asking for notification permissions
>But this article doesn’t really get into the stuff that the OS has built-in to manage notification priority, it just tells you to turn it all off
“Apple fortunately makes it straightforward to manage your notifications via Settings > Notifications — you can customize your notification preferences per-app, and if you’re on iOS 15 or later, you can also schedule a notification summary.”
>Kind of crazy that a blog post on this subject doesn’t even mention the Screen Time feature.
“using the native iOS screen-time feature or more advanced apps like Opal and Jomo to regulate your usage of them.”
I'm aware of that. iOS is a proprietary OS and how it does things isn't all that relevant to me in this context. The web is a different matter and I've yet to see a use case of push notifications that served me. But I've seen 100's of websites that I have zero reason to see as useful applications trying to trick me into allowing them to use push notifications.
> Safari has had add to home screen for the best part of a decade
On Chrome you can trigger a add to home screen prompt from your own UI, making it a two touch experience. On iOS IIRC it only works on Safari and not in Chrome, but I could be wrong.
> no one wants notifications from random websites
I am not talking about random websites, but rather web applications that you interact with on regular basis, if Apple cared about the user experience they could have just moved the notification prompt behind a user interaction.
> shared worker ... They burn battery life
If you are building more demanding websites shared workers are a great way to share state and computing resources across and thus saving battery life. Spawing a Worker per tab is more demanding.
No, thank you. I was hoping for improvements to iPhone's notifications, not have them expand to other devices.
I'm quite happy with all the social media notifications being confined to a single device; I can pick it up and check it when I want to, or put it away and ignore for a while. I know Apple wants me to set some sort of focus / do not disturb, but managing that seems too complex when the good old analog "put the phone away" works.
A calendar app, a messaging app, etc. All sort of apps have reasonable use cases for notifications, and now you can write those apps as persistent web apps on iOS.
The user should still have control over notifications of course, and if you're downloading, let's say, a shopping app, no reason to allow notifications, it'll just be ads or whatever.
> The feature list is quite long but one of the most notable ones is the lack of push notification support.
Personal opinion: Thank fucking god. I get enough requests for push notifications from websites on the desktop that don't need push notifications that I'm incredibly glad this isn't a feature on Safari (and iOS browsers which skin Safari).
> they choose that on purpose to inconvenience Android users.
So you keep saying, but what’s the source for the claim? It inconveniences iOS users just as much since it only happens during the interaction of iOS and Android. I doubt Apple hates Android so much they specifically choose to inconvenience their own users to spite the competing platform. Seems to me a more likely explanation is that they don’t care enough or don’t want to implement the protocol.
> why should I have to download an app in order to know when I get outbid on eBay or a notification when a package is delivered
What’s wrong with prioritized emails? Of course they prefer to send you push notifications via app because it is an additional (and someway less filtered) channel.
Once also push notifications will get the same spam inbox filtering system (which iOS already has) then we will all scream for the next channel to be filled of spam (retina displayed popups?)
> there is even a button to uninstall the app directly from the details page, which is a scary feature for developers and PMs. You never want your users to consider deleting your app to improve their battery life.
Awesome. Pressure on developers to improve battery usage is great. Now we need pressure for ram usage and speed.
> Ah yes... such as push notifications. Firebase would be so much more useful if Safari supported push notifications...
All part of Apple's plans to enforce their one and only apps store for use on the iOS platform. Wouldn't want those pesky webapps being able to sidestep Apple's walled garden.
> I think push notifications and offline support are the real killer features that Apple currently doesn't support.
Technically Apple does support offline via the older manifests mechanism (and "Add to Home Screen" which invokes it remains prominent in the safari share sheet) though it's a lousy (and pretty buggy) experience.
Interestingly they don't support any sort of web notifications on iOS despite having added local notifications ( https://www.w3.org/TR/notifications/) in macOS 10.8 and remote Safari Push Notifications (built on APNS) in macOS 10.9.
This is the fundamental difference in philosophies behind Android and iOS.
Apple likes to build their software (most of the time) like Python - its an opinionated platform that strives to make that best decisions for users. They've determined there's very little user benefit from having multiple push notification services, and they don't want to give users a way to shoot themselves in the foot by enabling such a setting that would impact battery life like that.
Many of Apple's decisions can be viewed through that lense.
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