This is why I hope PWAs take off more. If there is an implicit "save first party cookies forever" for PWAs that have been "installed" and we make them discoverable it's a net win.
Besides - there are plenty of other things Apple can do to ensure PWA's don't take off. For example, there is no ability for a web-app to have a "click here to install to desktop" button - the website must try to guide the user into clicking the share button and then creating a desktop icon - which most users don't associate with 'installing' something.
Also, the 50Mb limit on PWA's prevents a lot of usecases - like photo/video editors, and even most messaging apps.
This isn't just the limit for css/js... It's the limit for user data too. Ie. if you share some videos with a PWA app, then all the videos have to fit inside 50MB unless you want to fetch them from a server each time you play them.
Or consider a PWA music player - 50MB of music is all you can play offline.
Or a photo editor - 50MB is the limit for all your saved files unless you want to save them to a cloud server.
> Or consider a PWA music player - 50MB of music is all you can play offline.
> Or a photo editor - 50MB is the limit for all your saved files unless you want to save them to a cloud server.
Why should either of these be saving files in an app-specific private datastore? Music, photos, videos, etc. should be in the standard system locations. The app's data storage should be solely used for settings, cache, and other internal data only useful to the app.
I'm not familiar with PWAs but if they can't access system storage then I don't think they're a useful choice for a music player or photo editor.
Because you might not have unrestricted rights to the files. The Netflix app allows me to download movies to watch offline but they're DRMed and rented to me by Netflix, not owned by me. A Netflix PWA would not allow for such feature.
DRMed files can be stored on the normal filesystem just fine, if they're DRMed that means they're encrypted at rest and decrypted on the fly.
DRMed content providers might not want to store their files on the normal filesystem because then they might have to answer uncomfortable questions like "why can't I copy this file to X and play it there?" but there's no technical reason they can't do just like every DRMed content provider on normal PC platforms has always done and store encrypted files on the normal filesystem.
Exactly, they are in recent years moving to address these previous issues, I applaud them.
I would like it if they were more discoverable, but not necessarily with the obnoxious pop ups. It would be awesome if they let you list a PWA in the App Store for a fee or the 30% cut.