Immediate Action Needed! - Open Web Advocacy
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Apple has officially announced that they attempting to kill web apps in the EU, which will have ramifications worldwide

Apple has decided to remove Progressive web apps from iOS in EU. If you have a business in the EU or serve EU users via Web App/PWA, we must hear from you in the next 48 hours!

  • pedz
    4·
    4 months ago

    I’m using Android but I can give you a few personal examples on why I still prefer mobile websites to apps.

    1. The place where I take weather has a shitty app full of ads and always sending notifications. They don’t have PWA offered on their site but just going through a browser instead of the app is significantly better.

    2. YouTube’s app is also full of ads. So I use the mobile website in Firefox with uBlock Origin.

    3. Again with awful apps full of ads. Twitter is also much more tolerable through the mobile website. There’s no autoplay on FF and again, ads blocked.

    4. I still use IRC and my client is web based, so that I can see pictures and videos in my chats. The web based IRC client (The Lounge) offers PWA and it’s very nice to have the thing in a “clean” browser.

    Again, I don’t use Apple for reasons like this, but Firefox is already pretty bad with PWA and having those possibilities mangled or removed wouldn’t be acceptable to me.

    Maybe you don’t use a browser on mobile and just do everything through terrible apps. Maybe most people do the same. But if you don’t use it, why do you care if those using it want to retain the possibility to do so?

    I personally don’t watch TV so nobody watches TV anymore, right?

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      4 months ago

      For YouTube, I’ve found NewPipe (and probably others) offers a much better experience than YouTube in the web.

      The real reason I want PWAs to be a thing is because I don’t want to always use iOS and Android, and PWAs allow me to use an alternative. I really want to use a Linux phone like Pinephone, and PWAs will be a big part of that transition. PWAs are the only truly cross-platform development option, so they offer value to web devs as well as users.

    • heavyboots@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      4 months ago

      Interesting. I do visit a few websites regularly but I guess I’ve always just kept the tabs open in Safari and called it a day. (And Safari just stays in permanent Privacy mode so that as much tracking data is flushed as possible each time I close a tab.)