Sending Push Notifications to iOS from Pwa

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/

PWA push notification on IOS

The truth is NOT for mobile Safari, at the time I write this answer. I am doing a long research... The Apple PWA on Safari increased a lot, but is not comparable to others like Google Chrome browser. As It was said in the article:

At this point in time Apple's iPhone and iPads do not support native
push notifications. You can gracefully fallback to SMS notifications.

So, till the moment I have this resume to share:

• Do Progressive Web Apps (PWA) work on iOS? YES...
• Apple may wants to turn the PWA as an alternative to the Apple Store.
• We still can’t open an external link in Safari
• Still can’t use Push Notifications
• There is a 50MB service worker cache limit
• Web apps that have not been used will have their cached assets purged after 7 days

Fonts:webkit.org,developer.apple.com,brainhub.eu,love2dev.com,firt.dev

How to send Push notification to iOS WebApp (PWA)?

Unfortunately, push notifications are not yet available on IOS.

Right now, Safari only supports push notification on Mac.

If you want push notifications on IOS, you have to develop native app.

Push notifications or Web push notifications for PWA

Do web notifications work for PWAs in the background?

Yes, they work in background, even when the website is closed, thanks to service workers.

When a push signal is received, the service worker is activated and a JavaScript callback is invoked.

are web notifications a good enough substitute for push notifications

Web notifications, together with the W3C Push API, that delivers the messages in background, are real push notifications, that can be delivered even when a website is closed.

is it that Web notifications cannot be triggered by a server and thus push notifications are still necessary?

Yes, web push notifications can be triggered in background, from your server, using the Push API and WebPush protocol.

does it mean that they work if the iPhone user is using Chrome?

Currently (Q1 2021), iPhone doesn't support web push on any browser.

PWA Web Push Notification in IOS

According to https://caniuse.com/push-api it is only available via Apple’s custom protocol: Safari Push Notifications. This however requires an Apple App Id. Another solution would be to fall back on email/text message, or integrate with a notification app like https://pushover.net/

Push Notifications in iOS for Progressive Web Apps

All the leading browsers with the exception of Safari on iOS web push API. While Safari does support push notifications on Mac OS, there is no green signal for push notification iOS.Read full article here.

Push notification support for iOS Safari not added by Apple yet. So you need wait until support gets added. or you can think about alternatives like showing the notifications as alters/pop ups/notification center in iOS PWA.

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