this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
1607 points (98.8% liked)
Technology
76041 readers
3219 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
"Good thing I got revenge though on Google's sideloading ban by buying a phone that never allowed it to begin with"
We should make webapps for everything. When done properly they are as fast as native apps, can work on any device and do not require a dev license or account.
They're now supported on Firefox on Android, so good news!
Webapps are now supported on Firefox? Holy smokes!
Yup!
I don't know what that button does but I'm fairly sure it's not about support for web-apps. Firefox has always supported web-apps, because web-apps are just interactive websites.
It's the button to pin a PWA to the taskbar by reading the manifest.json
https://www.maketecheasier.com/enable-progressive-web-apps-firefox/
That's from August, when support was added back after the feature being dropped in 2020.
This is for the September 16 update.
https://www.ghacks.net/2025/09/16/mozilla-firefox-143-0-adds-support-for-progressive-web-apps-copilot-on-sidebar-important-dates-in-the-address-bar/
Progressive Web-apps are a particular kind of web-app. The person you replied to just referred to "webapps", not this special kind of web-app. Firefox has always supported web-apps.
The nature of progressive web-apps means that you can use them even if the browser doesn't explicitly support them. All that explicit support does is wrap the web-app in an icon and reduced browser window.
About time!
Thanks for the great news!
Completely agreed. Nowadays we even have WASM that can run more advanced things, and may even give webapps sandboxed capabilities, and can be run natively on any device with a WASM runtime.
Sweet solution
Funny thing: before the App Store, the original plan for the iPhone was that all third-party apps should be webapps.
there are technically alternative marketplaces on iOS in the EU, but they do the exact thing google is now copying off apple: apple still has to give the green light. apple "notarizes" every app, even if it goes through a third party app store. this changes the app irreversibly, and ios/ipados devices can only install notarized apps.