Why is Apple making big improvements to iPhone web apps?

by Jonny Evans

Apple seems to be working on something very interesting with Safari and its support for web apps on iPhones. It’s working on features that seem to make these apps work like the original apps.

This could be good news for any app publisher that wants to offer apps and services for Apple’s mobile platforms outside of the App Store.

what’s the story

The most recent changes in Safari 16.4 for iPad OS 16.4 and iOS 16.4 are available in first beta.

Safari gains more than 135 features in this release, including exciting audio improvements such as importing maps, media queries, and more. But the real improvements revolve around the web apps on the home screen.

Now, iPhones have been able to add a website icon to their home screen since the device debuted. These icons became the home screen web apps, so you can invoke the service with a tap, and it will work just like any other app, separate from Safari.

During the first year of the iPhone’s existence, Apple adopted the position that all third-party apps on the device were web apps, which changed with the birth of the App Store.

So what’s new?

What’s new now is that web payment support is being added to the web apps on the home screen. This will allow developers to send push notifications to users via Push API, Notifications API and Service Workers.

It might work like this: You connect to a website that offers a service, and you choose to make it a home screen web app. Now the app/website can send you personal notifications regarding its service, such as when new functionality is added or when new products become available.

Like anywhere else on mobile, users can agree or deny permissions for these interactions. These permissions can be managed on a per capita basis in your notification settings, and handled by Apple’s Focus tool, so you can block those you don’t want to hear from.

So we now have web apps that work like iOS apps.

what’s new? Badging API, so that these applications can show the number of messages or notifications available to the user, such as Mail. Apple also made it possible to host multiple instances of an app on your home screen – so you can have a favorite website called “Classic Online Games I Love” and have web apps for seven different games on your screen. Each of these different web services will be able to interact with you—even if those games use the open codec AV1, which Apple seems to be about to introduce support for.

This isn’t the only addition: Apple now allows third-party browsers to add websites and web apps to the home screen from the Share menu. And there’s more – web application developers can also use screen orientation, user alert, screen wake, and the web coding API.

Respectively, these allow the application to understand what the screen orientation might be; It will prevent the device from locking or dimming the screen when the web app is active; It will monitor user interaction to ensure that the application is still in use and does not need to be put to sleep; And it will provide much better media handling control for web applications.

All of these improvements mean that web apps become even more powerful on iOS.

So what does this mean?

In its simplest form, it means that web apps have the potential to become more powerful and more iOS-like than before, with developers having the ability to offer more complex interactions with apps.

But as Apple faces increasing scrutiny about its App Store business practices, it’s hard not to suspect that this could be one of the company’s most important responses to these challenges.

After all, if you can set up and interact with a web app or web service like an iOS app through any web browser, the only thing that might be missing is a payment system. we will see.