PWA Push Notifications Coming to iOS

PWA is a great technology, and it promisees web experiences on mobile at par with native apps. Android has been leading at implementing the PWA standards, while iOS was always lacking. That always represented an obstacle since no experience can ignore (in some markets) half of the audience.

The big thing missing on iOS was the push notifications API implementation of PWA, and some said that it won’t ever be implemented by Apple, as it would eat into their app business.

Add to home-screen was, and still is, also a non-standard implementation relying on the bookmark feature in Safari rather than the PWA APIs. However, with some clever visual guiding, you could instruct the user on installing it. For push notifications, however, there was no workaround.

Today’s big news is a discovery made on the beta of iOS 15.4 using PWA feature detector:

The tool detects the Push Notification API as present on iOS Safari version “15.4 Mobile.” If you’re reading this after the public release of iOS 15.4 or later, this might already be yesterday’s news to you, but this truly marks a milestone in PWA’s adoption.