What Progressive Web App features will Apple support?

Making predictions is a foolhardy business—especially when it comes to predicting what a tight-lipped organization like Apple will do. I’ve been burned before.

But I was recently asked what Progressive Web Apps features I thought Apple would support. On this topic, I have a little insight, but nothing that I would consider concrete enough to say something like “sources say.” In fact, it is likely that this is all wrong!

With that caveat out of the way, my slightly informed speculation is that…

Service workers.

Manifest files — Makes sense as an alternative to the numerous meta tags for icons and other apple-mobile-web-app features. It would clean up that clutter and could be an easy win.

Push notifications — They worry that people already hate native app notifications and don’t know that people will want them on the web. If they do decide to support them, it will happen quickly because notifications already work, in a non-standard way, on desktop Safari.

Add to home screen prompts — This only happens if the industry as a whole takes to PWAs in a big way. People will still be able to manually add to home screen.

PWAs in the App Store — Not necessarily to protect their native app revenue as people often suggest, but because why incur the expense of manually reviewing PWAs?

Again, take this all with a huge grain of salt. I don’t work for Apple.

The best way to make Apple support PWA features is to build PWAs that are compelling and make Safari users feel like they are missing out.

Let’s get to work!