this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2025
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Surely all of those things can be done in a browser. You can grant location and camera permissions to a website easy enough. And encrypted transfer can be done any number of ways. Offline recording is possible with localstorage. All of this seems very achievable and effectively uncensorable by Apple.
The only thing it can’t get is App Store search rank.
...offline support?
Yeah, you get some offline capabilities (like recording video to local storage) when you have a PWA. Obviously app or not, nobody is going to be uploading video without an internet connection.
iirc mobile safari doesn't do pwas and doesn't have a lot of the web apis
I guarantee you that all this can be done in Mobile Safari. I have done it before.
You have to go through the “Share > Add to Home Screen” workflow instead of having the site simply install it for you, so it’s a bit more effort (and confusion) on the user’s part.
It does. I'm posting this comment on the Mbin pwa on my iPhone, works pretty well.
It does. Installing them is intentionally obtuse and is buried in the “share” menu.
It would definitely be a bit more annoying to program, and a bit more naggy to the user for permissions during setup I'm sure, and running in the background would take some finagling and extra work and iOS could still kill it in the background on you ... but otherwise it'd be the same.
Probably doesn’t need to run in the background unless I’m missing some feature?
Video uploads. If the browser tab is closed, the upload is interrupted. An app can continue running in the background.
Sure, it's possible. But you're basically turning the browser into a virtual machine and building an app on that virtual machine, jumping through a lot of weird hoops in the process. It's unnecessary. Or should be unnecessary, anyway, with a sane operating system.
What? No man, this is all standard mobile web stuff.
A web browser is already basically a "virtual machine". You can even run what basically amounts to native code using WebAssembly (yeah it's closed to JVM but you get what I'm trying to say).
Yes, I know. I'm saying it should be an unnecessary layer.