Morgin

Specifically, I’d love to see a site that integrates this for a landing page along with utilizing the styled pages blocks.

No, and browsers don’t really adhere to that anymore anyway. It’s a bad user experience Why do you want right click disabled?

Also echoing if anyone has made some real life examples with active content, I’d love to see it!

"Increasing subscription costs by 6000%: A primer in enhancing our retirement plans" 100% open rate.

It’s an assumption that increasing engagement decreases substance. I disagree with that assumption for my own community, but I suppose that is very dependent on each community and the type of content you have to begin with.

Weird flex, but ok. Lots of people also like and enjoy the instant notifications. You do you, but as a forum admin, I’m not sure why you’d not want features that people can selectively enable to increase their engagement with your community.

You are focused on what you do and what works for you. Broader user trends are different. As @opentype noted above, it is true that anecdotally there’s lots of people who actually prefer to not have push notifications enabled, or who maybe prefer email. However, it’s obtuse to not recognize that the broader market has moved to a place where engagement is massively increased with native push notifications. Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram, snapchat, etc etc have all essentially built their broader advertisement based business model around keeping eyeballs in the app and on the screen to increase advertising metrics. There is no better method to increase eyeball time than native notifications. They’ve already figured this out, shockingly around the same time that traditional forums started their engagement and retention decline. 🧐

I understand why you think that’s a good option, but I really strongly believe it’s not. At least, it’s not something I believe would have a positive vs negative impact on engagement and wouldn’t be worth spending development effort on. The iOS and android ecosystems have evolved around the idea of native notifications. They have notification settings, drawers, home screen views, silencing options, etc. By comparison, iOS hasn’t significantly changed how it handles SMS messages in approximately a decade. Facebook primarily used SMS notifications in 2008ish, prior to smartphones, and it suuuuucked. You could get hammered with a few notifications in a row and they might come from different phone numbers and they were intrusive and annoying. They also ended up having to make it so people could text back vs replying on site because that sort of two way communication is what people expect from SMS. Everything about SMS screams last decade. It’s a dying protocol that shouldn’t even be used for 2FA due to its inherent insecurity. Anything but native notifications is just lipstick on the metaphorical pig, and IMO not worth the time to even think about in 2019.

Anyway, my terrible humour aside, great article!

100% understand where you are coming from. It’s time out of your presumably jammed packed work day for you to write something up and I appreciate it’s likely of no consequence. All I can ask is that you pretty please with icing on top try to make time for it, even despite all of that, because at least then someone of some developer stature has done what webkit/Apple claims they need done right now. If you look at the feedback that has stacked up, it’s actually of fairly poor quality. I’ve seen how the IPS team can lobby for and justify decisions even right here in heated feature debates. If there is any group I trust to put something on that bug tracker that is well written and justified, it’s your team. You never know until you try is the old adage. It may be increasing the odds someone revisits this at Apple with the business team from 0.0001% to 0.0002%, but as someone who desperately wants the feature and thinks the long term health of forum software as a whole requires the feature, I sincerely believe we need to try. All of us.

If you could get your members to use Prowl, you’re miles ahead of where I’m at!

I got two emails about this topic being posted. One on Saturday, and one this morning. When I clicked “go to this entry” in the Saturday email on Saturday, it said page not found. When I clicked in today’s email, it was here ready to read. I assume the Saturday email may have gone out before this topic was made visible 😄

What would the app do? Offer a wrapper for the mobile site? If so, likely to be rejected by app store. Can’t have apps that are essentially adding no functionality to the mobile site (and simply adding push has been grounds to reject apps, so that’s likely not a strategy) Should it be a single app for all IPS communities (essentially IPS tapatalk), or should each admin get a white label app? Some people are strongly against the idea of a one size fits all app and want a custom white label to market their own community. Guess what though, white label apps that duplicate other apps in function and only change the branding are also banned from the store. Would your community members download an app that’s not branded with your site logo and info? Should it work with individual plugins, or not support any third party plugins? People will have opinions on both sides of this, but generally speaking it’s likely it wouldn’t be possible to support plugins or marketplace add-ons without significantly reworking how they all interface to ensure it won’t break the app. Should they increase the licensing costs by 10x to support having dedicated android and iOS software development teams to keep feature parity and deal with customer support and bugs and all the stuff that comes along with being app developers? Unless you are a large enterprise site that can justify custom development of an app for your community that plugs into the IPS api, it’s unlikely you will see any sort of app for iOS for IPS. The technical and practical challenges that have caused this idea to fail for the last decade continue to exist. Progressive web applications are the answer to all of the above problems. There are the existing technical challenges (i.e features an IPS admin would use are only currently supported in android) and the perceived challenges (some including the IPS dev team believe Apple is purposely not including PWA support in WebKit to prevent cannabalizing App Store sales). I’ll say this until I’m blue in the face, but the current landscape that actually exists and can be verified through reading the actual WebKit developer’s statements on the topic of PWAs is that if you want to see further support for PWA features in WebKit (and by extension, iOS), they want people to provide detailed use case examples directly through the bug reports listed above which will aid in prioritizing development resources. The parallel benefit for this community is that if iOS implements additional PWA support, IPS will be able to finalize a strategy for support across all devices, and everyone who wants push notifications will likely get their wish. Sorry if I’m coming across as a bit grumpy on this topic, but for the dozens of threads we get on this topic and that every other community software package has had on this topic, there’s currently to date “ONE” person who has taken the time to follow the process outlined by WebKit to provide feedback on why they should devote development resources to the various PWA features we all want. I’m as guilty as anyone of sitting on this, but at the very least I am hopefully going to redirect people’s efforts from this forum where it’s shouting into an abyss to the webkit bug report tracker where it very well may also be an abyss but there’s a more than 0% chance it may have an impact. Also, @Matt, I’ll reiterate my request that IPS should still make a formal submission through the webkit tracker, even if you think it’s in vain and Apple is blocking PWAs. There’s at least a chance it helps move the needle if it comes from the developers vs the end users.

See above discussion. I’m not basing anything I’m saying on my own personal anecdotes about user numbers (aside from pushing back against this turning into an iOS vs android debate, and providing rationale for why I care). The only entity that matters is IPS. Until they come to say otherwise, I’m going to make a pretty confident assumption that their stats say that ~1% of users of an IPS community being on iOS is below average, and they make development priority decisions based on averages. If their data matched yours and showed iOS was only used by ~1% of community users globally, I’d reckon this topic wouldn’t need to exist. Anyway, we’re going in circles. I honestly don’t care if you like or don’t like iOS or think it should be relevant to this discussion or not. The reality is that it is relevant, IPS has said they don’t plan on developing a feature solely for android, and if you want to add meaningful input to help speed this along, there is a mechanism to do so outlined above. Beyond that, anyone adding “+1 I want push” is just adding noise, because it’s ignoring everything that’s already been said in this topic.

Hey @Joel R is one of the tips “don’t send an email blast with a link that doesn’t work and then have to try again?” 😂 (Kidding!)