Safari Push Notifications?

At Don’t Panic Labs, we have built many iOS and Android applications over the years. Many of them have been built using some sort of cross-platform technology, like Ionic. But why so many mobile applications?

Not one reason, many reasons. Sometimes customers want to be in the Apple and Google app stores. Sometimes they want access to device-native features, such as better access to the camera. But a common feature that has driven the world to native applications has been push notifications.

Until now, push notifications have been a feature reserved only for native applications. This is going to change.

At WWDC last month, Apple stated that they will be supporting push notifications for PWAs (progressive web applications) running in Safari. This is a big deal. This means that if all you need is push notifications, you won’t have to create an application for the app store, which also means that you won’t have to go through Apple’s approval process.

This feature won’t come out until sometime in 2023, so we can’t test it out yet. But this is a big change with some big ramifications.