iOS and iPadOS 16.4 developer beta, as well as the Safari 16.4 betas are out today!

Safari and WebKit are loaded with so many amazing things, but I'm particularly excited about the work I and countless other team members across Apple did to deliver Web Push for Web Apps on iOS and iPadOS.

Read all about it here - https://webkit.org/blog/13878/web-push-for-web-apps-on-ios-and-ipados/

Web Push for Web Apps on iOS and iPadOS

With iOS and iPadOS 16.4 beta 1 comes support for Web Push for Home Screen web apps, Badging API, Manifest ID, and more.

WebKit
Web Push is just one of the things we added the web apps on the Home Screen experience.
We also added:
- JavaScript Badging API
- The ability for all browsers to add to the Home Screen
- Other web APIs and improvements that are of particular interest to web apps on the Home Screen.
@bradeeoh In order to prompt the user for Web Push permission, I first have to prompt the user to add my web app to their Home Screen (A2HS), right? It would be a huge help if Apple would document best practices for prompting users to A2HS. (Should the web page teach the user how to A2HS?)
@dfabulich @bradeeoh definitely a +1 on this. Having a native “this webpage can be installed as an app” dialog would be a big step up. It would also allow users to dismiss them for all sites, instead of having to deal with each sites’ unique pop-over.
@bradeeoh this is huge. Thank you so much.

@bradeeoh @jensimmons 16.4 looks like a great release for Safari! Looking forward to it.

Do you know if the "Service Worker Context Closed" issue will be fixed? I am starting to see it daily at this point. And there doesn't seem to be a workaround other than deleting the sites data.

@cdevroe @jensimmons I'm not immediately familiar with this one. Do you happen to have a rdar: or bugzilla URL handy?
@bradeeoh “will now open in the user’s current default browser.”!
@bradeeoh Excellent news. I’d been lamenting its lack in some of the Mastodon webapps.
@bradeeoh Can you say if there remain plans to bring Web Push support to Mobile Safari (i.e. web push for webpages)? Or is this the end of the story?

@bradeeoh Thanks for posting the info!

Since web push is limited to home screen apps, I'm curious whether the notification settings persist if a user removes then reinstalls the app. Do you know what happens in this case?

@brian_kephart they do not save if you remove the app then reinstall.

@bradeeoh Will support for things like actions, icon, and image be added to iOS?

cc @jensimmons @jondavis

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Notification

Notification - Web APIs | MDN

The Notification interface of the Notifications API is used to configure and display desktop notifications to the user.

MDN Web Docs