No sound for PWA / web app notifications in iOS 16.4

pwa_developer Said:

"No sound for PWA / web app notifications in iOS 16.4"

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To the OP and All Readers:

Report this Bug to Apple:

Do your Part: These are user-to-user forums. Apple rarely reads these forums on their own time as it is. So, provide Apple with feedback on this.  Apple wont get back to you directly, but the more they hear of this, the more they will know what is going on, and what needs to be fixed.

To Provide Feedback:

1. Go Here: Feedback - iPhone - Apple
2. Select: "Bug Report" for the "Feedback Type"
3. Comment: that this all started after installing an update. Include the URL of this thread.
4. Proceed form there as necessary

Thanks for posting in the Apple Support Communities pwa_developer,

Notification options might vary by app. For web apps, check the notification options for the app that the web app opens in.

Use notifications on your iPhone or iPad

If you need more help, we recommend connecting with the developer of that web app, who would be the most familiar with the options available with it.

Cheers!

Safari is damaging Apple's brand so badly. Primitive errors like this just keeps coming, making me wonder whether they even have a QA process?

• web lock API: lock is not released after page refresh: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=239614
• indexedDB leak: https://safarileaks.com/
• now notification is pushed with no sound

I would rather Safari keep claiming these useful web API unsafe and refuse to implement them in the browser, instead of launching something broken since it will skip our feature check and release broken experience to our users.

Turns out that it works on iOS 16.6

Speaking of sound, normal sounds on my web site aren't working anymore in Safari on iOS 16.4, whether added to the home screen or just in the Safari browser. Not working in Chrome on iOS either, now that I check.

Webkit update bug -- or new Apple 'feature' that we'll have to accommodate just because Apple thinks differently?

This is a terrible answer. The purpose of having an operating system that provides notification sounds is to assist individuals who use applications and burdening developers with the responsibility of implementing complicated code to do that is ridiculous. I'm not sure what to believe - is the omission of sounds on PWA notifications an oversight on Apple's part? Or was it an intentional decision to remove sounds from PWA notification settings when they are standardly available for every native app?

So, here's another issue with Apple's supposed 'full support for notifications and badges for web apps.' The push notification event must be handled in a service worker (fine), and the badging only works from within the handler function for this event (fine), and the user has to add the app to xer home screen in a fairly cumbersome and manual way (not so fine, please give us a beforeinstallprompt event, Apple), but the real problem is that the service worker for the home screen -installed web app stops running in seconds when you minimize the app. What good are notifications and badges that can only appear when the user is actually using the app? I can make my own popup or 'badge' on the web page itself if the user is looking at it!

Am I missing something, or did Apple basically give us a big nothing-burger with respect to push notifications for web apps? Guess I'll have to keep my SMS notifications for when it's the user's turn in the game, and start working on making notifications via WhatsApp and other side channels, since Apple wont let the user even opt-in to receive them directly via iOS. Shame on you, Tim Cook.

Hi Robert,

Do you know if there is a particular setting in 16.6 that will need to be turned on in order for it to work? Or a do you happen to have a reference to any documentation we can use to configure it? We can't find anything that activates any options for our PWA other than Lock Screen, Banners, and Badges. We don't see any options in "Safari > Advanced" menu that look like what ware needing as well. We are seeing that some folks on Reddit are saying they see it in iOS-17, so we are going to give that a try.

Thanks, Robert.

We tested using another PWA app yesterday that we found available on Reddit and it worked well in both 16.6 and 17.

We appreciate you posing to the discussion, because we were just about to start developing a native app specifically for this functionality and now we won't have to. We wouldn't have known that for a while if you hadn't posted when you did. :)

Have a great day.

This still didn't work for my PWA after the upgrade to iOS 17. There simply was no "Sounds" option in the notification settings. After deleting and re-adding the PWA to my home screen this option appeared! Sound + vibration now works perfectly fine!

I am using a vanilla JS frontend + PHP backend approach. I think I followed this guide: https://devtails.xyz/@adam/how-to-setup-web-push-notifications-in-ios-safari

It’s very basic, but it gets the job done.

It's very frustrating that there's still no "Sounds" option, months after web notifications were hyped for 16.4. Now on 16.5, and still nothing. Pretty much makes PWA notifications useless.

Good luck with that as you can't select 16.4 as an iOS version. This release received the PWA support.

debar Said:

“Good luck with that as you can't select 16.4 as an iOS version. This release received the PWA support.”

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So, do your part in reporting it.