> I struggled with Guideline 4.2 when I tried to publish an app showing the bell schedule and other local information for the neighborhood school.
Why would you not just make this a webpage, and then the users could add it to home page as if it were an app? no Apple review necessary then. What does it being an app give you besides bureaucratic headaches?
1. Many people are more comfortable with apps, and don't really "surf the web," and for such people "a webpage" is at best a hassle.
2. Those people and many more besides have no idea what "add it to home page" even means.
It being an app gives those people an experience that matches their normal use of technology, and I think they're probably a majority of users.
Plus, if the parent feels like making an app instead of a web page, who is Apple (or you, or I) to discourage that?
> 2. Those people and many more besides have no idea what "add it to home page" even means.
If Apple supported the beforeinstallprompt event (available in Chrome since 2015) then people would have same experience as installing app [0]. Instead, you must create a wrapper around webpage and submit thru App Store.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/befo...
The main driver for making it into an app and not just a web page was the need to send push notifications. Of course, I just needed it for myself: hey, it's time to stop working and start driving to school to pick up the kid – "notify me 30 minutes before the last period ends" given that the schedule is different every day; then I just shared it with other parents.
There is a web version (it's Flutter so it was easy to make one), but parents use the app much more often.
If you add a web page (a PWA) to the home screen, it can do push messages on iOS since a couple of years.
The average person doesn't know this, nor what a PWA is.
Source: consulted for a company that had a PWA and paid me a lot of money to make it a native app because their users didn't know how to use the PWA.
there still a lot of jank. on ios u can only doo this with safari, and even then u loose actual safari niceties like trad browser ui. and idk why but it op ens link in actual safari even if its the same app. unless u have a single page app that does nothing this is not a viable route/.
nobody knows how to do this; they do know how to install an app
Users are /very/ not used to how to install PWAs to their home screen.
Also, in the EU it just opens the site up in your browser, no lack of browser UI like you'd expect. Apple is wonderful.
Edit: It seems I never got the news they reversed course on that particular idea of theirs.
I’m in the EU, and adding a website to Home Screen does hide the browser feel. Maybe this experience is different in different European jurisdictions.
Your point about users not being used to this is very real. I didn’t know you could until some app author showed me.
It really is as simple as sharing a link or copy-pasting, but if you don’t know it’s a think, it disappears into obscurity in the menus.
Ah, it seems they reversed course after a few betas.
There's still this funny business: https://developer.apple.com/support/alt-distribution-ux-in-t... & https://developer.apple.com/support/dma-and-apps-in-the-eu
I really hate it when the browser UI gets hidden. It loses me several great features like the ability to open multiple tabs. Or have a bookmark directly to a subpage.
Unfortunately some other features are only available to PWA do it's a tradeoff either way.
I live in the EU and just wrote my first PWA and that‘s not true, there is (almost) NO browser ui/ux.
No url bar, no back/forward, no tabs, nor translation, no menu bar, no loading indicator, just… pressing down on a link shows the target url and offers open, copy link, add to reading list and share -which honestly looks like a weird oversight.
I also have a small private app that technically could have been a PWA.
It’s not a PWA because the UX is just always inferior. Even though we’ve come really far in browser UIs, the browser is still very clunky compared to the smoothness of a native app.
And I like nice to use software.