Im using an iPhone to browser thru various PWA demos online.
Is the installation as simple as adding the URL to the Home Screen?
Well, as of today, iOS lacks proper support for PWAs, so you won't get any PWA-specific benefits of adding the Web app that is a PWA to the Home Screen on your iPhone. Basically, yes, you will have a shortcut on your Home Screen, but it wouldn't give you any Service Worker capabilities and also your users will never be prompted to add the app to the Home Screen automatically.
On iOS there is only a non-standard Apple solution with meta tags available that allows you to customize the appearance of your website when added to the Home Screen to some extent. See Apple docs.
See What Web Can Do and caniuse.
UPDATE Jun 2018: As of Safari 11.3, iOS supports PWA installation and Service Worker features. However it does not prompt for installation, so the only way to "install" a PWA is to use good old "add to home screen" menu link. Also, it still does not support Service Worker-based Push messaging.
Related
I noticed some blogs mentioned PWA works with IOS .. I have tried ' add to home screen and push notifications are not working ..please help me with sample demo.
In iOS 11.3, Apple included Service Worker. That's why everybody is saying that PWAs work on iOS. But unfortunately there is currently no way to send Push Notifications to a PWA running on an iOS device. Also the user needs to manually add the PWA to the home screen.
See: https://medium.com/#firt/progressive-web-apps-on-ios-are-here-d00430dee3a7
Apple is still lagging behind everyone here, even though they have had an add to homescreen functionality since 2007.
That is the answer to the add to homescreen. You need to use the mobile-web-app-capable, touch icons META tags to drive the iOS add to homescreen experience.
As for push, you will need to fallback, remember these progressively enhanced websites.
My fallback recommendation is SMS (Twilio is a good service for this).
Unfortunately, or maybe we are fortunate LOL, iOS does not support web push either.
I am examining PWA and Web Components technologies recently. As far as I have learned now Web Components is a new suit of tech,
Custom Elements, Shadow DOM, HTML Templates and HTML imports. Together with those Web Components enabling techs Web App Manifest, Service Workers, and certain performance improvement techniques used to make what is called as Progressive Web Applications.
What I wonder is when one "Adds to Home Screen" an application in a certain web browser what is the browser that opens it when it is launched from its home screen icon? Is it the browser it has been added to home screen from, or it is the default browser of the system no matter which browser it has been added to home screen from, or it is just a generic web view available on the host operating system at the moment like the one used in native web applications?
Lastly, is it possible for a developer coding her/his app to choose one?
Currently, for me, these combinations open a new "Standalone" window
I believe Android/Chrome is the only one that installs a WebApk
All the others are just shortcuts to open your website in that browser without the normal browser navigation items
I know of no options for the developer for how the shortcut opens your PWA
Android 8.10 - Chrome 67
Android 8.10 - Chrome (beta) 68
Android 8.10 - Edge 42
Android 8.10 - Opera 43
iOS 11.4 (simulator) - Safari
As test I created app shortcut of site https://pwa.rocks from browser:
Brave
Firefox
Chrome
and found that there were 3 different shortcut created for each of the browser. Launching each shortcut resulted in opening the respective browser that created it.
I believe there is no way of changing the default browser to launch the app by coding something in the app. I could not find a way of doing that, if someone knows how to do it, I will be interested to know about it
Here is similar question: What browser will PWA (Progressive Web App) use after adding to home screen?
Check if app is already installed on iOS from safari "Browser" using java script or any other way. I need to check on my website weather my app is installed or not. If yes then I would like to open the app when somebody opens my website.
I have the URL for my app to open.
Right now I have given two options on my website:
1) I have app installed will open the app
2) Available on the app store.
I want to decide at my side weather app is installed or not.
Using Any web technology.
The new smart app banner feature in iOS 6 may cover what you are looking for.
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariWebContent/PromotingAppswithAppBanners/PromotingAppswithAppBanners.html
I'm working on a mobile web app (website) that requires you to add it to the home screen. When you open it, and switch to another app, then go back to my web app, the whole app reloads. It shows the splash screen and doesn't even remember where you last were.
Is there a way around this? I can't find any details in the iOS docs.
It seems that this topic will answer your question.
You can't avoid this refresh behavior. You should work with the HTML5 local storage to persist the state of your application and use it when the application is launched to restore his state.
Here is a link to the Safari Developer Library focussing on your question.
hey guys,
I was looking around how I could make dashboard or icons set in iphone, i was looking a lot on the internet but i didn't find the answer. I meant dashboard as home screen in iphone
Thanks
You'd probably want to look at the Three20 library, developed to support the development of the Facebook iOS app. This library will give you the possibility of creating a dashboard like the one in the home screen of the Facebook app.
You can find the source code and documentation at the official GitHub repository, lots of info at the project home page, and an example of the Launcher component (probably this is what you need) at this page.