Brady EidsonApr 25, 2023
As of iOS and iPadOS 16.4, web apps saved to your Home Screen support badging!
We've heard questions about the deets, so we wrote a blog post with the deets.
https://webkit.org/blog/14112/badging-for-home-screen-web-apps/
Badging for Home Screen Web Apps

Along with the many other features for web apps on iOS and iPadOS 16.4, WebKit now includes support for the W3C’s Badging API.

WebKit
Show threadSasha Chudesnov

@bradeeoh this is a very welcome change.

But web apps still don’t feel like 1-class citizens. For example, both web apps I have installed on my Home Screen suddenly stopped working with VoiceOver while Safari tabs with the exact same apps work perfectly fine. I only found out because I was testing some stuff but I can imagine how frustrating that would be if I actually relied on VO on a daily basis, I’d probably stop using those glorified shortcuts altogether and just use a native app instead.

Apr 25, 2023 at 10:18pmWeb
Show threadBrady EidsonApr 28, 2023
@chudesnov Thanks for the report. We tried a few different web apps and could not reproduce what you describe.
The exercise did actually reveal a few VO bugs we weren't aware of yet, but they reproduced in both Safari and on the Home Screen. And were nowhere near "VO stopped working"
Could you tell us more about what device you're using, what specific OS version, what specific Web App, etc?
Show threadSasha ChudesnovApr 28, 2023

@bradeeoh the device is iPhone 12 mini with iOS 16.4.1. The apps were Twitter and pinafore.social. The specific issue was that VoiceOver didn’t “see” _any_ elements of the app, just its scrollbar.

I restarted the device a couple of times yesterday and now cannot reproduce the issue so I assume it had something to do with a long-running instance of an app (yep, know that’s not the most exciting thing to debug), both of which are SPAs

Show threadBrady EidsonMay 1, 2023
@chudesnov This has been added to the radar we're tracking with. Thank you!