Workaround for missing "Web Push" on Safari for my PWA

Question

I am developing a PWA that requires Push-Notifications. Sadly IOS/Safari does not support https://w3c.github.io/push-api/#pushmanager-interface for now, so I think i might have to wrap a native APP around in some way.

In Android (before their "Trusted Web Activities" was a thing) you could use a WebView to basically display a headless Chrome-View in your App. Whats the equivalent in IOS and how does the interaction between push-notifications and the Webapp (the browser need to jump to a specific page) work?

One more thing I need is integration with our companys Mobile Device Management, which is Microsoft Intune. Having integrated MDMs in Android in the past i Know that this might be a major pain in the a**, so i'm considering to build the wrapper myself, for maximum flexibility. Another option would be something like Ionic, not sure now.

Answer 1

This may not necessarily work in your situation, but I had the exact same issue with a PWA for Safari and I solved it by just using long polling. It will allow you to get around all of the limitations with Safari and I was able to redirect and load sections within our SPA.

async function subscribe() {
  let response = await fetch("/subscribe");

  if (response.status == 502) {
    // Status 502 is a connection timeout error,
    // may happen when the connection was pending for too long,
    // and the remote server or a proxy closed it
    // let's reconnect
    await subscribe();
  } else if (response.status != 200) {
    // An error - let's show it
    showMessage(response.statusText);
    // Reconnect in one second
    await new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, 1000));
    await subscribe();
  } else {
    // Get and show the message
    let message = await response.text();
    showMessage(message);
    // Call subscribe() again to get the next message
    await subscribe();
  }
}

subscribe();

https://javascript.info/long-polling