Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cseelus 2964 days ago
We run a small SaaS which basically implements (mobile) Quality Control for the cleaning sector.

Being able to inspect buildings, rooms etc. while one is offline (imagine the cellar of a clinic without proper WiFi) is crucial for our users. So we had to build native iOS and Android apps to support that, duplicating many features of our responsive webapp. Most users still prefer our webapp though (some use the „Add to Homescreen“ feature of iOS for example and use our webapp like a native app anyway). With Service Workers supported on iOS since 11.3 we are currently evaluating if we can finally implement offline support with our webapp. So far it looks good, which for us and our users really would make things a lot easier.

1 comments

Is there a reliable way to not bug users with the "add to home" prompt if they already have? The last implementations I saw were all underwhelming in this regard.
There is no way to know. Apple makes it intentionally difficult to add a website to the home screen.

Furthermore, tons of users are on chrome or browsing from an app like Twitter, but the "add to home" functionality is only available from Safari.

Not to mention that adding an app to the home screen REMOVES some APIs like getUserMedia
What? Why?
It's technically a different rendering engine to Safari, so it doesn't have some features as they were only added to Safari currently.
How hard is it to click on the share button and click "Add to Home Screen"?