Ios/Ipados Safari Push API Support

iOS/iPadOS safari push api support

iOS 12, 13, and now iOS/iPadOS 14 still doesn't support these features:

• Web Push Notification
• Background Sync
• Page Lifecycle
• Service Workers on WebViews
• Universal Links / Link Capturing

So many requests from the community for these features but Apple don't want to hear it. Maybe they think these features have a bigger chance to be unnecessary exploited(spam, etc). And also maybe they want to force developers to create the native application rather than the progressive web application.

Sending Push Notifications to iOS from PWA

I just want to let you all know: Apple will support push notifications for web apps! This news was published at the WWDC2022. Apple will release Web Push with Safari 16 on macOS (Ventura) in a few months (2022) and for iOS and iPadOS in 2023.

See: https://webkit.org/blog/12945/meet-web-push/

ios 12 PWA web push notifications. Does it work?

No the web push api is not yet available on the iOS yet (as of May 2019)

refer here https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/PushManager

IOS 12 PWA support

PWAs are a complex collection of features and functionalities. Apple added an initial support for some PWA characteristics in iOS 11.3 in march 2018. You can read a really good explanation here, with their significant limitations:

Progressive Web Apps on iOS are here
https://medium.com/@firt/progressive-web-apps-on-ios-are-here-d00430dee3a7

Unfortunately iOS 12.0 doesn't seem to have improved the support in any significant way.

SEP2019 UPDATE: iOS 13.0 is here, and with it many bug fixes regarding PWAs, new installation UI and other stuff. But still no push notifications: https://medium.com/@firt/iphone-11-ipados-and-ios-13-for-pwas-and-web-development-5d5d9071cc49

MAR2019 UPDATE: This is the definitive state of PWA support in iOS 12.2 stable. It's improving but it's still a long journey: https://medium.com/@firt/whats-new-on-ios-12-2-for-progressive-web-apps-75c348f8e945

JAN2019 UPDATE: It seems like Apple is moving forward! Beta1 of iOS 12.2 has improved the PWA support. Still no push notifications though: https://medium.com/@firt/pwas-on-ios-12-2-beta-the-good-the-bad-and-the-not-sure-yet-if-good-a37b6fa6afbf
https://medium.com/dev-channel/progressive-web-app-progress-in-ios-12-2-beta-1-build-16e5181f-a18cd05ca361

Can we run firebase realtime listening on ios serviceworker?

While iOS don't support Web Push notifications yet(as of Apr-2018), all you can do is have an event listener for data from server side(Firebase in your case) and receive that data to show it as an Notification/alert or how ever you want to present inside your application(not in iOS notification area).

Unfortunately, this is the best way you can handle notifications for iOS. I know, its not so great for developers :) Hope Apple speeds up on PWA. They are more than a year late to Service worker party itself. What to expect!

Update : One more link on WhatWebCanDo.today and one from Apple which says iOS-Safari don’t support push notification as a web standard defined by w3c. But looks like there is a OS X safari proprietary solution available.

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