I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much is possible with an iOS PWA these days. It certainly doesn’t cover all bases but it would cover a lot… if only they’d make it easier to actually install one. With iOS 26 they’ve put it yet another tap deep!
It's often argued that Apple doesn't make PWA installs obvious because they want to preserve the sanctity of the web or something along those lines but I'd say that argument is invalidated by the “smart banners” for installing an App Store app that you can set via meta tag:
Interesting that it‘s possible to do it with a single HTML file, the icons and manifest being dynamically generated in JS and set as data URLs. I wonder if that works reliably.
Favicon defined as SVG in the HTML then converted to PNG. That's a neat trick.
pcdoodle•15m ago
Fantastic minimal example. For those wondering what you can do with PWAs, check out https://whatpwacando.today/
senoal•5m ago
hey thanks for this.
do you know if we can also do this:
when signing up we send the confirmation link to the user's email. however, when the user clicks the link in the email it redirects to the website and not the pwa. is there a way to redirect to the pwa? thanks
afavour•44m ago
It's often argued that Apple doesn't make PWA installs obvious because they want to preserve the sanctity of the web or something along those lines but I'd say that argument is invalidated by the “smart banners” for installing an App Store app that you can set via meta tag:
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/webkit/promoting-a...
In my experience they're far more intrusive than a PWA install banner!
CharlesW•30m ago
Also interesting: "Now every site can be a web app on iOS and iPadOS." https://webkit.org/blog/17333/webkit-features-in-safari-26-0...