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Not entirely- you can still receive notifications even if you're not installed to the home screen.

The progressive path isn't great, but installing an app from an App Store is a huge jump for users to make, so neither is ideal really...



On iOS you can't get notifications if you've closed out of Safari... it's not really usable.

A simple scenario is - you're inviting someone to a chat room. You send them an invite and now you have to wait. Usually what people do is other things - like go to a different website, go to a different app, etc. In only the case where you're sitting on the same website will you get a notification. It doesn't work.

It gets worse - let's say you installed the app to your homescreen. You run through that same scenario above - you navigate through your web app into /chatroom and click on an invite button there. Then you navigate away to another website/app. When you come back to the homescreen app, the entire site has reloaded and it will take you automatically to the main screen of your web app: /

Note - these broken behaviors are only on iOS.


Oh, yeah. I don't consider iOS a full PWA platform for exactly these reasons. Sad really.




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