The full screen thing -- have you tried saving the SPA to the home screen?
Together with some meta tags, that launches full screen and stays full screen, like an app.
The bashing on apple for this "to sell more apps" is nonsense, Apple originally designed and intended for HTML5 apps to beat Flash.
One of the earliest games for iPhone was PacMac, it was a SPA web app saved to home screen, it worked great.*
OTOH, in 30 years of web dev, I never got pages about raccoons to work either.
* Haven't checked this lately to see if they deprecated this.
brailsafe•1h ago
> The bashing on apple for this "to sell more apps" is nonsense, Apple originally designed and intended for HTML5 apps to beat Flash.
Whatever their apparent intention might have been ~15 years ago, it would be hard to argue that Apple puts a lot of resources into trying to protect its fiefdom. I don't think it would be all that different to suggest they (Apple) wouldn't try to control how people pay for apps by preventing app developers to offer a web-based payment option, on the basis of their past relationship with HTML5. A huge component in their success with iPhones has been control over the entire supply chain.
That said, it is a somewhat conspiratorial take that is probably better explained by laziness, bad choices, and control over proprietary UX patterns (that suck), than generalized competition, but it's not much of a reach. They also compute localStorage limits differently and have always diverged for stupid reasons
llmslave2•1h ago
Interestingly enough Apple has put a ton of effort into Safari recently and have shot up to the top of the interop leaderboards.
I don't really buy the conspiratorial takes either. I think they just had different priorities for their browser.
NooneAtAll3•1h ago
this felt not as a "50 problems in web api" list, but more like "50 reasons to stop caring about iOS and just leave it rotting"
qingcharles•1h ago
I feel like there are a lot of iOS/iPadOS 17 and below devices holding things back right now. Desktop browsers are in a really good standards space now with their constant and frequent nagging for users to update.
AshleysBrain•55m ago
It sounds like they were testing with iOS 12? In practice that has fallen out of use and doesn't need to be supported any more. Yes, a bunch of problems are to do with Safari specifically, but if you target relatively modern versions only (iOS 16+ is pretty reasonable IMO) it'll save a lot of pain.
irishcoffee•15m ago
I'm so glad every time I see something like this that I don't do webdev for a living.
I've cross-compiled code for mobile before, and I've made personal websites before. I sure wouldn't want to do that for a living.
Terretta•3d ago
Together with some meta tags, that launches full screen and stays full screen, like an app.
The bashing on apple for this "to sell more apps" is nonsense, Apple originally designed and intended for HTML5 apps to beat Flash.
One of the earliest games for iPhone was PacMac, it was a SPA web app saved to home screen, it worked great.*
OTOH, in 30 years of web dev, I never got pages about raccoons to work either.
* Haven't checked this lately to see if they deprecated this.
brailsafe•1h ago
Whatever their apparent intention might have been ~15 years ago, it would be hard to argue that Apple puts a lot of resources into trying to protect its fiefdom. I don't think it would be all that different to suggest they (Apple) wouldn't try to control how people pay for apps by preventing app developers to offer a web-based payment option, on the basis of their past relationship with HTML5. A huge component in their success with iPhones has been control over the entire supply chain.
That said, it is a somewhat conspiratorial take that is probably better explained by laziness, bad choices, and control over proprietary UX patterns (that suck), than generalized competition, but it's not much of a reach. They also compute localStorage limits differently and have always diverged for stupid reasons
llmslave2•1h ago
https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025?stable
I don't really buy the conspiratorial takes either. I think they just had different priorities for their browser.