A catalog of Mobile Safari's missing and broken web APIs is making the rounds again — and the list hasn't gotten shorter.
pwa.gripe documents the specific ways Apple's browser holds back Progressive Web Apps on iOS: missing Push API support that took until 2023 to partially land (and still requires home-screen installation), absent Web Bluetooth, no Badging API, broken fullscreen behavior, storage eviction that nukes IndexedDB data after just days of inactivity, and a parade of WebKit bugs that go unfixed for years. These aren't edge cases. They're the building blocks other platforms shipped years ago.
The pattern is hard to explain as mere resource constraints. Apple employs hundreds of WebKit engineers. Chrome, Firefox, and even Samsung Internet have implemented these APIs. The gaps align suspiciously well with a single incentive: protecting the App Store's 15-30% commission on in-app purchases. A capable PWA is a distribution channel Apple doesn't tax.
This argument isn't new, but the regulatory landscape is. The EU's Digital Markets Act forced Apple to allow third-party browser engines on iOS in the EU starting with iOS 17.4 — the first crack in WebKit's monopoly since the iPhone launched. Apple's response was characteristically passive-aggressive: they briefly threatened to remove home-screen web apps entirely in the EU before public backlash forced a reversal. That move alone told you everything about the company's actual priorities.
For developers shipping cross-platform products, the practical calculus hasn't changed much. If your app needs push notifications, background sync, or reliable offline storage on iOS, you're still building a native app or using a wrapper like Capacitor. The web-first dream works on Android; on iOS, it's a second-class citizen by design.
What has changed is that the excuse window is closing. With regulators in the EU, Japan, and the UK all scrutinizing Apple's browser restrictions, and the US DOJ antitrust case explicitly citing WebKit exclusivity, the pressure to ship competitive web APIs is mounting from directions Apple can't simply ignore with a WWDC slide about "privacy."
The tracker at pwa.gripe serves as a useful receipts folder. Next time someone at Apple claims Safari is a "world-class browser," you can point to the specifics — not vibes, not ideology, just a checklist of what ships everywhere else and doesn't ship in Safari. The gap is the tell.
It would be useful if the site listed whether these had been standardized outside of Chrome yet.It’s hard to delineate which of these are Chrome features or actual web standards. And it’s therefore hard to blame either Safari or Firefox for not supporting them if they’re not standardized yet.
I'm writing this in Safari now, I'm a huge fan. There are several "features" that I actively dislike and disable in other browsers. I wonder if not being implemented in mobile safari is preventing them from being required in some webpages.* Vibration* Background Sync* Bluetooth*
You might want your browser to do Bluetooth, NFC, Background stuff, Face Detection but I don't.I like to use Apple products for things that are commodities to me because I am not gonna look into the details of those and when I do Apple reasoning often make sense to me (just like this list).Ther
Gotta meet your audience where they are. As a Mobile Safari user, the foremost way I feel my use of the web is crippled is that pages assume a bigger screen or are just poorly arranged.This of all web pages ought to be easy to read on an iPhone screen, but the way it's constructed prevents it.
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I am curious why Safari in particular is getting a lot of the hate here when firefox supports even less of the features which leads me to believe that the reason many of these features have not been accepted is because they have not been accepted by the larger ecosystem and is just google pushing th