Mastodawn

I’m surprised I haven’t heard more responses from web developers about the change to Safari on iOS and iPadOS regarding web apps. Now every website can be a web app (saved to the Home Screen and opened as a stand-alone app) — not just sites that have been configured a certain way by the developers.

It’s a big difference for users. Every site gets the same experience. No more mysterious sometimes-it-works-one-way, sometimes-another.

Read more: https://webkit.org/blog/17333/webkit-features-in-safari-26-0/#every-site-can-be-a-web-app-on-ios-and-ipados

Derk-Jan 💙💛🇺🇦Sep 30, 2025

@jensimmons not to be ungrateful or anything, but I think this sort of applies:

https://youtu.be/B0B_ekSrsEk?si=den9FpNxcoRED-i4

I Take Care Of My Kids

YouTube

SouprMatt Sep 30, 2025

@jensimmons This looks great, I hope the word gets out there more!

@jensimmons Maybe because it's still extremely inaccessible to create a "web app" from a website. Hiding it in the share menu is just bad.

Nico…Sep 30, 2025

@jensimmons unfortunately (or for safety reasons ?) it doesn’t handle access to saved passwords. But it’s still a cool feature !

minyak Sep 30, 2025

@jensimmons good feature. I use it lots to cull some apps on my limited-capacity iPhone e.g. chesskid

Henrik Pauli Sep 30, 2025

@jensimmons Wasn't this kind of feature a Hot Thing like 10 years ago? And then it seems to have fizzled out completely. Or maybe only on the Android front, I don't remember.

spartanatreyu Oct 1, 2025

@phl @jensimmons It fizzled out because it wasn't supported by apple

Peter Saathoff-Harshfield Sep 30, 2025

@jensimmons This is great to see, but it doesn’t work well in a few ways, at least with the site I have had on my home screen for several years, https://text.npr.org/. The favicon isn’t picked up, I can’t use a dark mode style extension, and I can’t pull to refresh. All three of those work/worked when it just opened a Safari tab. I could be missing something though.

NPR : National Public Radio

Open Web Advocacy Oct 1, 2025

@jensimmons The reason is, this feature makes no meaningful difference to the viability or uptake of web apps compared to native apps. For web apps to be successful you and your team need to develop install flows as easy as installing native apps (install banners, same number of steps, nice UI etc) but we all know that's never going to happen because of AppStore revenue.

The erosion of the mobile web lies at apple's feet.

Open Web Advocacy Oct 1, 2025

@jensimmons I know you personally care about the future of the web, so happy to set up a meet to explain exactly what would actually move the needle but I doubt corporate would allow it.

Antonio Bueno Oct 1, 2025

@jensimmons Not a web developer but, is #Safari doing anything better than what I did with a #shortcut in a summer afternoon two years ago?

https://routinehub.co/shortcut/16316/

I tested Safari’s new feature a bit and I still can’t change the icon, or set the scope (not all #webapps are at the root of a domain!). Do splash screens still need to be the device’s retina resolution? Are they still stretched in landscape iPads? 😬

Colin Oct 1, 2025

@jensimmons we’re a wee bit sidetracked by the need to (hopefully temporarily) adapt to layout viewport bugs introduced by 26.0 (partially fixed by 26.1), and visual viewports that differ based on Tab layout settings (Compact/Bottom/Top) when the virtual keyboard is present, but the new Home Screen default behaviour is sooooooo welcome. I’m really looking forward to depending on it, instead of reaching for native apps that are essentially webview wrappers💜

Alfonso Martínez de Lizarrondo Oct 1, 2025

@jensimmons as a web developer, we already have a standard way to tell the browser how it should display my web app .
Why should I be excited about Apple doing its own thing ?
I want you to show an install icon because I'm telling you that my web is ready to act like an app, anything else is a failure.
This is a feature for users, not developers.
Please, tell us why this is better than providing a web manifest (that we're already doing)

William O'Connell Oct 1, 2025

@jensimmons As a developer I was already specifying the behavior I wanted in the manifest, so I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be excited about here. I can see the consistency argument, but this is also just one more thing the user can be confused/distracted by during the install process. A process that seems to require more taps with every Safari update.

Jesper Oct 1, 2025

@jensimmons It would be helpful if we could get a standards position on the Web Install API https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/463
That way we can inform our users about the existence of this functionality. A lot of our users seem to not be aware that this possible in the first place.

Web Install API · Issue #463 · WebKit/standards-positions

WebKittens @marcoscaceres Title of the proposal Web Install API URL to the spec https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/WebInstall/explainer.md URL to the spec's repository No r...

GitHub

Chris Armstrong Oct 1, 2025

@jensimmons I really appreciate this and all you’re doing that makes the web more of a first-class platform on mobile, but I’m finding the lack of persistent data storage makes most PWAs unworkable

mnmlst Oct 2, 2025

@jensimmons I’m more interested in being able to so this on macos. I’ve tried running Slack this way to avoid their horrible electron app. But it fails in many ways. Not sure if that’s a shortcoming of the slack web app itself though.

Artem R 🇺🇦Oct 2, 2025

@jensimmons I don’t think any website need it, but the one the need did not gained anything from it as they already using manifest

Wes Hargrove Oct 9, 2025

@jensimmons Small steps, congrats. We're still missing (1) better integration with system 'chrome', and (2) Periodic Sync to name a couple. There's a lot of ground to improve user experience for web apps on iOS.