I have a chat app that my girlfriend and I use. It's an installable pwa, has push notifications, does some caching of images and code, mobile and desktop views. Simple username and password signup and login so it's easy to use on a work computer.
The big hindrance is that iPhone doesn't support browser notifications. So it is really only app-like on Android. I think they are awesome but you are missing half the market.
It's not a bad thing. I have an Android and sometimes it's easy to miss out and allow push notifications on a website. Next thing you know, you're getting bombarded with push notifications about "12 things cats like to do in spare time" . It's not exactly straightforward to revoke a website's push notification authorization either and you need to go into settings to do that.
Assuming you're talking about web push notifications in general and Chrome for Android it's super easy and exactly the same as Chrome for Windows & OSX:
- When on the site in question just tap the padlock/favicon in the URL bar, tap "site settings" and then you can see the permissions granted and change them as you want to.
- Alternatively, you can get to the same "site settings" screen directly from any web push notification in your Android notification panel simply by expanding the notification in the usual way and selecting "settings", which takes you to the "site settings" screen as before.
So if revoking from any page on the site and from any notification pushed by the site isn't straightforward enough then what do you propose instead?
I wish it was enforced somehow to have the user need to click a button signaling their desire for push notifications. The auto pop up is so slimy. Same with installing as an app. Very few first time users want to install your pwa. It would be much higher if it didn't offer an install till N regular visits.
My parents (~75yo) have Androids and they essentially ignore all notifications. They allowed notifications on a few clickbaity news websites that spam then with tens of notifications a day. So they just don't know what it is and ignore them all, including potential relevant ones (like Whatsapp messages from family).
I, as a creator of a web app that would benefit a lot from notifications, would appreciate Apple adding push notifications to web. But I understand their choice
Thing is with iOS notifications as they are, if you ignore them the system suggests you to revoke the notification permissions so it's not really an issue
I am not exactly sure what you are saying as I don't have an iOS either, but I was talking about their phones that are Android.
Anyway, a mere suggestion to turn notifications off will be likely as ignored as the spammy notifications themselves. That are a lot of assumptions that people used to phone technology make about what is logical, easy, intuitive or obvious that do not hold for people who lived for 50 years before mobile phones existed
This is unrelated to your comment, but I saw a past submission of yours https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12276956 and was wondering how your experience went (as I am now in the same position), but did not see an email in your profile to contact you.
Hi, I just saw this now. My email is in my profile, the last line.
Anyway, my experience went terribly! lol
Not much learning though. I stayed there for only 5 or 6 weeks because of a very toxic work environment, with a workaholic culture and a very micromanaging boss that did not trust me (not sure why I was hired in the first place). After that, I decided to study fulltime to learn to code and now I am a happy frontend developer.
But if you want to email me with details of your position, I do think I can help you.
IIRC, my movie booking app has permission to read SMS OTP and once tried to bait me saying my Amazon package was delayed. Seems it read my package notifications too.
The big hindrance is that iPhone doesn't support browser notifications. So it is really only app-like on Android. I think they are awesome but you are missing half the market.