Developer insight: Web notifications coming soon to Apple devices or are they?

Mobile app developers have a love-hate relationship with the App Store. Specifically, those who have a high percentage of their players on iPhones. They love the reach the Store gives them to acquire new players, but the real downsides are the hoops you need to jump through to get your app listed. In their 13,000-word “guidelines,” restrictions include types of apps they will accept, and where, and the slice that the App Store takes on every dollar spent through the app, kicking a big hole in potential revenue you can earn from your players.

Apple, in particular, has come under increasing pressure from anti-competition lobbyists to offer other ways for users to utilise their apps on iPhones. But a business with over 745 million software subscribers, grossing over $70bn in direct app revenue a year, isn’t going to give that up easily. Add to this their slowing revenue from hardware sales, and some commentators see Apple increasingly as a software company rather than a vendor of high-end devices.

As a software business constantly under scrutiny, Apple is under pressure from anti-trust regulators to show opportunities for companies that don’t, or can’t, have apps in the App Store. The ruling from their very public lawsuit with Epic Games in the US, and the EU ruling in favour of Spotify, also means that Apple needs to show tangible proof that the Apple ecosystem isn’t closed to competition.

Apple is doing everything it can to hold onto its dominant position while appearing to listen to software makers’ concerns. They continue to make only minor tweaks to App Store terms in response to class actions and slowly introduce small, frequent changes. Those changes make it very difficult for developers to stay on top of what would make Apple block their new app listing.

So, how do the recent announcements at the June 2022 WWDC event give us a clue to Apple’s response to pressures? First, it continues to show Apple’s strategy for the glacial pace of change.

Apple has for years been fighting a rear-guard action against applications other than approved apps on its store, accessing phone and browser functionality. Push notifications, for example, have been possible on Apple mobile apps since 17 June 2009. Just 11 months after it introduced the App Store in July 2008. They have always seen the Apple Push Notifications service (APNs) as a critical part of the iPhone experience.

Google has allowed much more extensive options for delivering notifications on Android devices. For example, since 2013, it has been possible to deliver notifications on an Android phone to users who don’t have the mobile app installed but have subscribed for notifications from a mobile responsive website or progressive web app (PWA). The big difference here is that neither websites nor PWAs are downloaded from the Google Play Store, so they aren’t governed by the submission rules or delivering a revenue cut for the Play Store. Apple’s resistance to follow Google’s lead, as it did when it first introduced notifications to mobile apps published through the Google Play Store, could easily be seen as an attempt to restrict the popularity of web-based applications over mobile apps published through its stores.

Apple argues that it’s about maximising users’ customer experience, but increasingly it has been seen as anti-competitive. It’s strongly suspected that the recent announcement at WWDC 22 to introduce web push notifications to Apple devices is a way to demonstrate that they have no platform bias. They will soon introduce web notifications to browsers running on mobile devices, closing the gap between mobile apps and web apps.

Forward-thinking

Interestingly, the technology has been available as a developer test build for months. At their developer conferences, Apple often announces features well into the future to get their community excited about what’s to come. Rarely do they announce something that will be available up to a year later. So, why announce now, and why so far in advance?

Anti-trust pressure may have led to the announcement this year. And maybe, just maybe, by kicking the can down the road, the heat will come off, and it may ship, or it may never see the light of day. Time will tell.

The power of push notifications to re-engage with lapsed users and send reminders to Apple users, as has been possible with Android, is undoubtedly a good thing.

Here’s hoping that Apple is ready to truly embrace customer experience across mobile and web applications. We’ll be watching this space closely over the coming months.

Bob Lawson is director of mobile offerings at Optimove. He joined Optimove early in 2022, when it acquired Kumulos, the company he co-founded. Kumulos was a market-leading mobile and web messaging platform serving a broad range of industries. Lawson has spent more than 18 years in technology, particularly mobile martech. He has held commercially facing roles in startups, scale-ups and large enterprise businesses, particularly in mobile technology. Before working in the tech space, he spent 15 years in financial services, most recently as marketing director of one of Europe’s largest fund management companies.