Safari on mac already supports push notifications, but unlike on chrome/firefox you need a push server certificate (similar to how push notifications work for ios apps)[1] to actually push messages. That obviously requires the $100/year of a developer subscription. It's not a huge deal if you're running a business, but if you're just a hobbyist trying to push notifications to your own devices without a third party app, that sucks.
In other words, Apple only supports a proprietary protocol that notably differs from the standard every other browser uses in that you must pay them a yearly fee and agree to their massive developer ToS in order to use it.
Well, that sucks. The blogspam websites that spam notifications to make money off ads will be able to afford the certificate but getting notifications from your self-hosted services will cost you instead.
Hopefully Apple revises this policy (i.e. give out free certificates limited to a certain amount of notifications or a certain amount of domains) but I wouldn't keep my hopes up.
Luckily, several governments are preparing to add legislation to force Apple to allow alternative browser engines, so there's still a chance this problem might resolve itself in the future.
One of the biggest advantages native apps have had over websites is the ability to send notifications.
This difference has disadvantaged individuals and companies that find themselves needing to invest in both having a website and a mobile app, and discouraged investment into good web experiences. As websites can finally provide experiences and leverage notifications as well as apps have been able to, I think we’ll see the quality of the web improve considerably.
I think the more likely outcome of this is a bunch more grandmas with 12 ads on their lockscreen at all times because users are so conditioned to click "accept" for every prompt they see just to get it out of the way
Web push notifications have basically only been used to make shitty experiences. Random websites sending you ads, every news site you just happened to click to read one article trying to trick you into letting them send notifications for new articles they publish, etc.
Apple has been refining the iOS notification experience to prevent this from being a problem for apps and I’m sure this will apply to websites too.
For example, putting notifications in the scheduled summary or asking users if they want to turn off notifications from an app they haven’t engaged with recently.
On the other hand, 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. Like any messaging channel, not every business is going to use it in a smart way overnight. But I’m confident Apple will put the right guard rails around it, and it will be a welcome replacement to email. Unlike email, web push is privacy friendly, and has standard opt-in and opt-out methods.
Given that it’s opt in (likely by adding the website to your Home Screen I imagine if the Safari storage expiration is any indication) - how’s this any different than apps spamming you?
I'm glad some people are happy about this. I'm just hoping Apple includes an option to automatically opt out of all web notification requests. The fact that every website asks you to accept notifications has rendered the feature useless, since I feel compelled to disable it entirely at the browser level to block those obnoxious pop-up.
I think it is a red herring to see the lack of push notification support on web as some kind of “big” handicap vs native. There are so many advantages that native brings, push notifications is probably in a second tier list (10th+).
I have notifications disabled on my browser because for every 1 useful notification I got, I get 50 requests to send me notifications because I visited a website once.
Finally! If they add support for persistent offline storage that doesn’t get automatically cleaned up then mobile web apps might finally be a viable alternative to native ones. Less of a need now that react-native is more mature, but the update model of mobile we is still much better.
Persistent or longer than 7 days isn't guaranteed with sites added to home screen, though it rarely happens it can be cleared (has happened to me after iOS updates).
My only problem with the 7day storage limit is that every and any site gets the 7-day limit with no regard to if the user has interacted or actually used it, and to me that fails the privacy test. I've posted some ideas about that here before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30402242)
Finally. Though I wonder how this will be implemented. How’s this done on android?
The amount of FUD on this post is sad. People commenting on this who have no idea this has already been opt in since 15.3 via advanced safari settings.
I feel like the FUD comes from battling browser-based "allow notifications" requests from websites from whom no one wants to receive notifications--to me that is learned human FUD, as opposed to bullshit-FUD from a competitor trying to manipulate a market.
Notifications suck in browsers. Maybe they turn to to magic in the iOS universe because of the device-ness aspect.
Remember when everyone started getting Calendar spam because web pages abused being able to easily subscribe to a calendar?
Yeah. I hope they have some safeguards here. At the very least, require an Apple Developer account so abusers can't hide behind anonymity. Also, let me pre-emptively disable this feature across all websites.
Every other browser has supported these for years, and the sky hasn't fallen. If anything, the iOS implementation will probably be even more conservative than the others.
> Every other browser has supported these for years
And a lot of non-technical people I know had spam notifications coming up on their desktop because they opted into notifications on multiple spam sites over the years.
I think chromium edge have a somewhat conservative one already. Edge now automatically bans sites that spam random notification request that rejected by everyone from pop up new request.
Require user interaction for popping up request isn't really a clearly more strict one than edge currently does (probably equal or a bit more strict?).
More notifications nobody is really asking for. Devs may think it's cool but when like 99% of users are disallowing webpage notifications.... It's just not newsworthy.
No one needs them on random websites, and I agree it's really sucky when you visit a site you've never been to before and the first thing they propose is turning on notifications. (These days, invariably with a fake notification dialog so declining doesn't lock them out from asking again. Yuck.)
There's a lot of web-based applications that could benefit, though.
ya ya, having the feature/capability is a nice to have for some web apps (web, the platform apple's been restricting/hating/building against for more than a decade), and even in that space more notifications is debatably not a good thing, but trying to also say it's not newsworthy, not a feature to dwell on from WWDC etc. Apple has a habit of making flashy announcements for stuff that's either not news/been around, or could just be rolled out in updates (like for example almost all of the silly messaging updates/features?)
Yup. If this isn't allow/disallow by web site, I'll be turning off all Safari notifications. Even so, aside from messaging apps, I pretty much have notifications turned off already.
I will interact with my phone on MY terms rather than have garbage pushed to me at all hours of the day.
Having worked with PWAs I don't get my hopes up anymore when it comes to iOS, they have added and subsequently broken support for key features in the past. I wish they would just fix the current features they claim to support rather than keep adding half-assed features that won't properly work once you install the app in the phone, for example.
> Having worked with <technology> I don't get my hopes up anymore when it comes to iOS
In my experience iOS and Safari in general is an absolute wasteland of buggy, half-implementations of tech that should be table stakes at this point. WebRTC [0] is the most egregious. It's one of the many reasons that Google had to fork WebKit into Blink.
The telegram PWA is shockingly good. It’s not quite as good as the native app but it feels as good as a regular okish native app. It’s useful to get around chats banned by apple as well.
An app that starts out as a web app, but lets you add it to your desktop and it will look just like any other app on your computer. Given that the browser/OS supports it.
Readit News
[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ne...
"You do not need to be an Apple Developer Program member."
Hopefully Apple revises this policy (i.e. give out free certificates limited to a certain amount of notifications or a certain amount of domains) but I wouldn't keep my hopes up.
Luckily, several governments are preparing to add legislation to force Apple to allow alternative browser engines, so there's still a chance this problem might resolve itself in the future.
I have no trouble seeing value in creating a little friction for intruding on users attention.
One of the biggest advantages native apps have had over websites is the ability to send notifications.
This difference has disadvantaged individuals and companies that find themselves needing to invest in both having a website and a mobile app, and discouraged investment into good web experiences. As websites can finally provide experiences and leverage notifications as well as apps have been able to, I think we’ll see the quality of the web improve considerably.
Web push notifications have basically only been used to make shitty experiences. Random websites sending you ads, every news site you just happened to click to read one article trying to trick you into letting them send notifications for new articles they publish, etc.
For example, putting notifications in the scheduled summary or asking users if they want to turn off notifications from an app they haven’t engaged with recently.
On the other hand, 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. Like any messaging channel, not every business is going to use it in a smart way overnight. But I’m confident Apple will put the right guard rails around it, and it will be a welcome replacement to email. Unlike email, web push is privacy friendly, and has standard opt-in and opt-out methods.
Rather than reject them one domain at a time, I disabled it entirely in Firefox. The entire feature is essentially useless because of this.
This part is a bit chicken-and-egg. If you have to build a mobile app regardless, because iOS doesn't support web push, why invest in web push too?
Once this rolls out I anticipate we'll see legitimate use cases in greater numbers, as some new projects realize they don't need to be apps anymore.
As a user, like hell am I ever going to enable this.
My only problem with the 7day storage limit is that every and any site gets the 7-day limit with no regard to if the user has interacted or actually used it, and to me that fails the privacy test. I've posted some ideas about that here before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30402242)
The amount of FUD on this post is sad. People commenting on this who have no idea this has already been opt in since 15.3 via advanced safari settings.
Notifications suck in browsers. Maybe they turn to to magic in the iOS universe because of the device-ness aspect.
Yeah. I hope they have some safeguards here. At the very least, require an Apple Developer account so abusers can't hide behind anonymity. Also, let me pre-emptively disable this feature across all websites.
It's opt-in. RTFA.
> Web push notifications
> Adds support for opt‑in notifications on iOS. Coming in 2023.
I’m assuming that they, like me, never want to even be asked. The request itself winds up being a form of spam.
And a lot of non-technical people I know had spam notifications coming up on their desktop because they opted into notifications on multiple spam sites over the years.
Require user interaction for popping up request isn't really a clearly more strict one than edge currently does (probably equal or a bit more strict?).
There's a lot of web-based applications that could benefit, though.
I will interact with my phone on MY terms rather than have garbage pushed to me at all hours of the day.
In my experience iOS and Safari in general is an absolute wasteland of buggy, half-implementations of tech that should be table stakes at this point. WebRTC [0] is the most egregious. It's one of the many reasons that Google had to fork WebKit into Blink.
[0] https://bugs.webkit.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=webrtc+safar...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...
Exactly.
Deleted Comment