My bug report on Apple’s websites-in-the-dock feature on desktop has me thinking about how starkly different it is on mobile.
On iOS if you want to add a website to your home screen, good luck. The option is buried within the “share” menu.
First off, it makes no sense that adding something to your homescreen counts as sharing. Secondly, how is anybody supposed to know that unless they’re explicitly told.
It’s a similar situation on Android. In theory you can prompt the user to install a progressive web app using the botched BeforeInstallPromptEvent. In practice it’s a mess. What it actually does is defer the installation prompt so you can offer it a more suitable time. But it only works if the browser was going to offer an installation prompt anyway.
When does Chrome on Android decide to offer the installation prompt? It’s a mix of required criteria—a web app manifest, some icons—and an algorithmic spell determined by the user’s engagement.
Other browser makers don’t agree with this arbitrary set of criteria. They quite rightly say that a user should be able to add any website to their home screen if they want to.
What we really need is an installation API: a way to programmatically invoke the add-to-homescreen flow.
Now, I know what you’re going to say. The security and UX implications would be dire. But this should obviously be like geolocation or notifications, only available in secure contexts and gated by user interaction.
Think of it like adding something to the clipboard: it’s something the user can do manually, but the API offers a way to do it programmatically without opening it up to abuse.
Somewhere along the way, despite a reasonably strong anti-framing culture, framing moved from being a huge no-no to a huge shrug. In a web context, it’s maligned; in a native app context, it’s totally ignored.
Yup, frames are back—but this time they’re in native apps—with all their shocking security implications:
The more I think about it, the more I cannot believe webviews with unfettered JavaScript access to third-party websites ever became a legitimate, accepted technology. It’s bad for users, and it’s bad for websites.
By the way, this also explains that when you try browsing the web in an actual web browser on your mobile device, every second website shoves a banner in your face saying “download our app.” Browsers offer users some protection. In-app webviews offer users nothing but exploitation.
The inability to compete with native apps using Progressive Web Apps fully—particularly on iOS—also has a big impact on my work and the businesses I have worked with. Progressive Web Apps are extremely accessible for development, allowing for the creation of a simple app in a fraction of the time and complexity of a native app. This is fantastic for allowing smaller agencies and businesses to innovate on the web and on mobile devices and to reach consumers. However the poor support for PWA features by Safari and by not allowing them in the App Store, Apple forces app development to be difficult, time consuming and extremely expensive. I have spoken with many companies who would have liked an app to compete with their larger competitors but are unable to afford the huge costs in developing a native app.
It turns out that in 2022, for a lot of apps, the dream of write once run anywhere has finally arrived.
Every year browsers and web technologies become more capable and more powerful. Every year there are more kinds of app that you can make cross platform.
So before you start your next project, why don’t you take a look at cross platform web apps. Maybe they aren’t right for your project, but maybe, like me, you’ll discover that you can code once and run everywhere. And I think that’s amazing.
I’ve got an iPhone so generating screenshots (and video) from that wasn’t too bad. But I don’t have access to an Android phone. I found myself scouring the web for templates that I could use to mockup a screenshot of the address bar.
That got me thinking…
Wouldn’t it be cool if there were a service that generated those screenshots for you? You give it a URL, and it spits out screenshots of the site complete with overlays showing the installation flow on Android and iOS. It could even generate the img markup, complete with differently-scaled images for the srcset attribute.
Download the images. Copy that markup. Paste it into a page on your site. Boom! Now you’ve got somewhere to point your visitors to if you’d like them to install your progressive web app.
There are already some services out there for generating screenshots of mobile phones but they’re missing is the menu overlays for adding to home screen.
The devrels at both Google and Microsoft have been doing a great job of promoting progressive web apps. They’ve built tools to help you with tasks like generating icons or creating your web app manifest. It would be sooooo nifty if those tools also generated instructional screenshots for adding to home screen!
I don’t know about you, but it seems like everyone I follow on Twitter is playing Wordle. Although I don’t play the game myself, I think it’s pretty great.
Not only does Wordle have a very sweet backstory, but it’s also unashamedly on the web. If you want to play, you go to the URL powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle. That’s it. No need to download an app.
That hasn’t stopped some nefarious developers trying to trick people into downloading their clones of Wordle from app stores. App stores, which are meant to be curated and safe, are in fact filled with dodgy knock-offs and scams. Contrary to popular belief, the web is quite literally a safer bet.
Wordle has a web app manifest, which means you can add it to your home screen and it will behave just like a native app (although I don’t believe it has offline support). That’s great, but the process of adding a web app to your home screen on iOS is ludicrously long-winded.
Macworld published an article detailing how to get the real Wordle app on your iPhone or iPad. On the one hand it’s great to see this knowledge being spread. On the other hand it’s dispiriting that it’s even necessary to tell people that they can do this, like it’s a hidden nerdy secret just for power users.
At this point I’ve pretty much given up on Apple ever doing anything about this pathetic situation. So what can I do instead?
Well, taking my cue from that Macworld article, the least I can do is inform people how they can add a progressive web app to their home screen.
On both Android and iPhone the journey to installing a progressive web app begins with incomprehensible iconography. On Android you must first tap on the unlabeled kebab icon—three vertical dots. On iOS you must first tap on the unlabeled share icon—a square with an arrow coming out of it.
When it comes to mobile operating systems, consumer choice means you choose which kind of mystery meat to eat.
I’ve included screenshots to help people identify these mysterious portals. For iOS I’ve also included a video to illustrate the quest to find the secret menu item buried beneath the share icon.
Handy tip: when you’re adding a start_url value to your web app manifest, it’s common to include a query string like this:
start_url: "/?homescreen"
I’m guessing most people to that so they can get analytics on how many people are starting from an icon tap. I don’t do analytics on The Session but I’m still using that query string in my start_url. On the home page of the site, I check for the existence of the query string. If it exists, I don’t show the link to the installation page. So once someone has installed the site to their home screen, they shouldn’t see that message when they launch The Session.
If you’ve got a progressive web app, it might be worth making a page with installation instructions rather than relying on browsers to proactively inform your site’s visitors. You’d still need to figure out the right time and place to point people to that page, but at least the design challenge would be in your hands.
Should you decide to take a leaf out of the Android and iOS playbooks and use mystery meat navigation to link to such a page, there’s an emoji you could potentially use: 📲
It’s still worse than using actual words, but it might be better than some random combination of dots, squares and arrows.
(I’m not really serious about using that emoji, but if you do, be sure to use a sensible aria-label value on the enclosing a element.)
This is such a handy tool for building forms! Choose different combinations of type, inputmode, and autocomplete attributes on input elements and see how that will be conveyed to users on iOS and Android devices.
Back in March, I wrote about a dilemma I was facing. I could make the certificates on The Session more secure. But if I did that, people using older Android and iOS devices could no longer access the site:
As a site owner, I can either make security my top priority, which means you’ll no longer be able to access my site. Or I can provide you access, which makes my site less secure for everyone.
In the end, I decided in favour of access. But now this issue has risen from the dead. And this time, it doesn’t matter what I think.
Most notably, this includes versions of Android prior to 7.1.1. That means those older versions of Android will no longer trust certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt.
This makes me sad. It’s another instance of people being forced to buy new devices. Last time ‘round, my dilemma was choosing between security and access. This time, access isn’t an option. It’s a choice between security and the environment (assuming that people are even in a position to get new devices—not an assumption I’m willing to make).
But this time it’s out of my hands. Let’s Encrypt certificates will stop working on older devices and a whole lotta websites are suddenly going to be inaccessible.
I could look at using a different certificate authority, one I’d have to pay for. It feels a bit galling to have to go back to the scammy world of paying for security—something that Let’s Encrypt has taught us should quite rightly be free. But accessing a website should also be free. It shouldn’t come with the price tag of getting a new device.
A Chrome-only API for adding offline content to an index that can be exposed in Android’s “downloads” list. It just shipped in the lastest version of Chrome.
I’m not a fan of browser-specific non-standards but you can treat this as an enhancement—implementing it doesn’t harm non-supporting browsers and you can use feature detection to test for it.
It’s disappointing that Apple, supposedly a leader in interface design, has resorted to such uninspiring, and I’ll dare say, lazy design in its icons. I don’t claim to be a usability expert, but it seems to me that icons should represent a clear intention, followed by a consistent action.
Automatically generates icons and splash screens based on Web App Manifest specs and Apple Human Interface Guidelines. Updates manifest.json and index.html files with the generated images.
A handy command line tool. Though be aware that it will generate the shit-ton of link elements for splash screens that Apple demands you provide for a multitude of different screen sizes.
This seems to work quite nicely: convert your progressive web app into an APK file that you can then submit to the Google Play store (you’ll still have to go through all the hassle of submitting the app, but still).
It’s interesting to compare the release notes for each browser and see the different priorities reflected in them (this is another reason why browser diversity is A Good Thing).
A lot of the Firefox changes are updates to dev tools; they just keep getting better and better. In fact, I’m not sure “dev tools” is the right word for them. With their focus on layout, typography, and accessibility, “design tools” might be a better term.
Oh, and Firefox is shipping support for some CSS properties that really help with print style sheets, so I’m disproportionately pleased about that.
In Safari’s changes, I’m pleased to see that the datalist element is finally getting implemented. I’ve been a fan of that element for many years now. (Am I a dork for having favourite HTML elements? Or am I a dork for even having to ask that question?)
And, of course, it wouldn’t be a Safari release without a new made up meta tag. From the people who brought you such hits as viewport and apple-mobile-web-app-capable, comes …supported-color-schemes (Apple likes to make up meta tags almost as much as Google likes to make up rel values).
There’ll be a whole bunch of improvements in how progressive web apps will behave once they’ve been added to the home screen. We’ll finally get some state persistence if you navigate away from the window!
Updated the behavior of websites saved to the home screen on iOS to pause in the background instead of relaunching each time.
At first glance, the release notes for Chrome 72 are somewhat paltry. The big news doesn’t even seem to be listed there. Maximiliano Firtman again:
Chrome 72 for Android shipped the long-awaited Trusted Web Activity feature, which means we can now distribute PWAs in the Google Play Store!
Very interesting indeed! I’m not sure if I’m ready to face the Kafkaesque process of trying to add something to the Google Play Store just yet, but it’s great to know that I can. Combined with the improvements coming in iOS 12.2, these are exciting times for progressive web apps!
Long story short, the NOSCRIPT intervention looks like a really great feature for users. More often than not it provides significant reduction in data usage, not to mention the reduction in CPU time—no small thing for the many, many people running affordable, low-powered devices.
An excellent idea for people in low-bandwidth situations: automatically disable JavaScript. As long as the site is built with progressive enhancement, there’s no problem (and if not, the user is presented with the choice to enable scripts).
I got an intriguing email recently from someone who’s a member of The Session, the community website about Irish traditional music that I run. They said:
When I recently joined, I used my tablet to join. Somewhere I was able to download The Session app onto my tablet.
But there is no native app for The Session. Although, as it’s a site that I built, it is, a of course, progressive web app.
They went on to say:
I wanted to put the app on my phone but I can’t find the app to download it. Can I have the app on more than one device? If so, where is it available?
I replied saying that yes, you can absolutely have it on more than one device:
But you don’t find The Session app in the app store. Instead you go to the website https://thesession.org and then add it to your home screen from your browser.
My guess is that this person had added The Session to the home screen of their Android tablet, probably following the “add to home screen” prompt. I recently added some code to use the window.beforeinstallprompt event so that the “add to home screen” prompt would only be shown to visitors who sign up or log in to The Session—a good indicator of engagement, I reckon, and it should reduce the chance of the prompt being dismissed out of hand.
So this person added The Session to their home screen—probably as a result of being prompted—and then used it just like any other app. At some point, they didn’t even remember how the app got installed:
Success! I did it. Thanks. My problem was I was looking for an app to download.
On the one hand, this is kind of great: here’s an example where, in the user’s mind, there’s literally no difference between the experience of using a progressive web app and using a native app. Win!
But on the other hand, the expectation is still that apps are to be found in an app store, not on the web. This expectation is something I wrote about recently (and Justin wrote a response to that post). I finished by saying:
Perhaps the inertia we think we’re battling against isn’t such a problem as long as we give people a fast, reliable, engaging experience.
When this member of The Session said “My problem was I was looking for an app to download”, I responded by saying:
Well, I take that as a compliment—the fact that once the site is added to your home screen, it feels just like a native app. :-)
Chris has written about switching code editors. I’m a real stick-in-the-mud when it comes to switching editors. Partly that’s because I’m generally pretty happy with whatever I’m using (right now it’s Atom) but it’s also because I just don’t get that excited about software like this. I probably should care more; I spend plenty of time inside a code editor. And I should really take the time to get to grips with features like keyboard shortcuts—I’m sure I’m working very inefficiently. But, like I said, I find it hard to care enough, and on the whole, I’m content.
I was struck by this observation from Chris:
When moving, I have to take time to make sure it works pretty much like the old one.
That reminded me of a recent switch I made, not with code editors, but with browsers.
I’ve been using Chrome for years. One day it started crashing a lot. So I decided to make the switch to Firefox. Looking back, I’m glad to have had this prompt—I think it’s good to shake things up every now and then, so I don’t get too complacent (says the hypocrite who can’t be bothered to try a new code editor).
Just as Chris noticed with code editors, it was really important that I could move bookmarks (and bookmarklets!) over to my new browser. On the whole, it went pretty smoothly. I had to seek out a few browser extensions but that was pretty much it. And because I use a password manager, logging into all my usual services wasn’t a hassle.
Of all the pieces of software on my computer, the web browser is the one where I definitely spend the most time: reading, linking, publishing. At this point, I’m very used to life with Firefox as my main browser. It’s speedy and stable, and the dev tools are very similar to Chrome’s.
Maybe I’ll switch to Safari at some point. Like I said, I think it’s good to shake things up and get out of my comfort zone.
Now, if I really wanted to get out of my comfort zone, I’d switch operating systems like Dave did with his move to Windows. And I should really try using a different phone OS. Again, this is something that Dave tried with his switch to Android (although that turned out to be unacceptably creepy), and Paul did it ages ago using a Windows phone for a week.
There’s probably a balance to be struck here. I think it’s good to change code editors, browsers, even operating systems and phones every now and then, but I don’t want to feel like I’m constantly in learning mode. There’s something to be said for using tools that are comfortable and familiar, even if they’re outdated.
Yeah. Fuck this. That’s creepy. Technically I opted into this feature because Google Maps asked “Google Maps would like to know your location, YES or NO?” Of course my answer was “YES” because, hey, it’s a fucking map. I didn’t realize I consented to having my information and location history stored indefinitely on Google’s servers.
I began all the work of disabling this “feature” but it seemed like a fruitless task. Also worth noting, Google Maps for iOS keeps Location History as well.
I vaguely remember there being some talk of changing the labelling, but I could’ve sworn it was going to change to “install”. I’ve got to be honest, just having the word “add” doesn’t seem to provide much context. Based on the quick’n’dirty usability testing I did with some co-workers, it just made things confusing. “Add what?” “What am I adding?”
Additionally, the prompt appeared immediately on the first visit to the site. I thought there was supposed to be an added “engagement” metric in order for the prompt to appear; that the user needs to visit the site more than once.
You’d think I’d be happy that users will be presented with the home-screen prompt immediately, but based on the behaviour I saw, I’m not sure it’s a good thing. Here’s what I observed:
The user types the URL archive.dconstruct.org into the address bar.
The site loads.
The home-screen prompt slides up from the bottom of the screen.
The user immediately moves to dismiss the prompt (cue me interjecting “Don’t close that!”).
This behaviour is entirely unsurprising for three reasons:
We web designers and web developers have trained users to dismiss overlays and pop-ups if they actually want to get to the content. Nobody’s going to bother to actually read the prompt if there’s a 99% chance it’s going to say “Sign up to our newsletter!” or “Take our survey!”.
The prompt appears below the “line of death” so there’s no way to tell it’s a browser or OS-level dialogue rather than a JavaScript-driven pop-up from the site.
Because the prompt now appears on the first visit, no trust has been established between the user and the site. If the prompt only appeared on later visits (or later navigations during the first visit) perhaps it would stand a greater chance of survival.
It’s still possible to add a Progressive Web App to the home screen, but the option to do that is hidden behind the mysterious three-dots-vertically-stacked icon (I propose we call this the shish kebab icon to distinguish it from the equally impenetrable hamburger icon).
When a Firefox 58 user arrives on a website that is served over HTTPS and has a valid manifest, a subtle badge will appear in the address bar: when tapped, an “Add to Home screen” confirmation dialog will slide in, through which the web app can be added to the Android home screen.
This kind of badging also has issues (without the explicit text “add to home screen”, the user doesn’t know what the icon does), but I think a more persistently visible option like this works better than the a one-time prompt.
I don’t think Chrome for Android has any plans for this kind of badging, but they are working on letting the site authors provide their own prompts. I’m not sure this is such a good idea, given our history of abusing pop-ups and overlays.
Sadly, I feel that any solution that relies on an unrequested overlay is doomed. That’s on us. The way we’ve turned browsing the web—especially on mobile—into a frustrating chore of dismissing unwanted overlays is a classic tragedy of the commons. We blew it. Users don’t trust unrequested overlays, and I can’t blame them.
For what it’s worth, my opinion is that ambient badging is a better user experience than one-time prompts. That opinion is informed by a meagre amount of testing though. I’d love to hear from anyone who’s been doing more detailed usability testing of both approaches. I assume that Google, Mozilla, and Samsung are doing this kind of testing, and it would be really great to see the data from that (hint, hint).
But it might well be that ambient badging is just too subtle to even be noticed by the user.
On one end of the scale you’ve got the intrusiveness of an add-to-home-screen prompt, but on the other end of the scale you’ve got the discoverability problem of a subtle badge icon. I wonder if there might be a compromise solution—maybe a badge icon that pulses or glows on the first or second visit?
Of course that would also need to be thoroughly tested.
