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by ckuhl 2973 days ago 

  App Store on iOS feels safe
Does it feel safe or is it actually safe? A big part of Apple's competitive advantage is the quality it provides (real or perceived). If an app provides a subpar experience, they can yank it from the app store, whereas they have no recourse if a PWA starts e.g. cryptomining in the background.
2 comments
mephitix 2973 days ago
Both. From an end-users perspective - someone who doesn't know the inner workings of the app store - then it feels safe. In a world where common people are becoming trained not to click to download random links on the internet and look at the 'lock in the address bar', going to the App Store app and seeing the familiar UI feels safer. For us tech folks, then yes, we know it is safer.
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maneesh 2972 days ago
Strangely, their new ad platform appears to be pretty gameable in some respects...

https://medium.com/@johnnylin/how-to-make-80-000-per-month-o...

That said, they just denied an app I released (here on Google Play https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pavlok.mee... , it syncs my content from different media sources around the web) was denied. They said it was too close to a web experience.

We've released several iOS and Android apps, and inside of our apps are mini-apps (different habits and behaviors our users want to change). The app we were attempting to make used React, which was giving us a headache.

The denial was annoying, but fortunately, iOS just enabled PWAs. It seems to my developers that the site is essentially Web technologies (HTML/CSS/JS) + a Manifest. By doing that, you can enable push notifications and offline access. Is that essentially it? Because that might solve the problem of making apps rapidly on multiple platforms for us.

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mephitix 2972 days ago
PWAs are broken on iOS. Push notifications are not supported, and in general the experience is pretty bad.

See this article for more details: https://medium.com/@firt/progressive-web-apps-on-ios-are-her...

The worst is that if you are in a PWA, say in a page like /my/sub/page and navigate out of the PWA, like go to a different website or go to another app, and then come back to the PWA, it will reload and go to the / home page, destroying all state and routing.

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