According to a new post on the WebKit blog, Apple's new iOS 16.4 and iPadOS 16.4 betas will allow Safari web apps on your home screen to send you push notifications.
Since the first iPhone, you could add shortcuts to websites that showed up as app-like icons on your home screen, but web apps couldn't send you notifications or show notification badges. But that seems to change with iOS and iPadOS 16.4.
A web app added to the Home Screen will be able to request permission to receive push notifications as long as it's in response to direct user interaction, such as tapping the 'subscribe' button. iOS or iPadOS will ask the user to give permission to send notifications to the web app. The user will then be able to manage the permissions of web apps in Notification Settings just like any other app on iPhone and iPad.
Notifications from web apps will work just like notifications from other apps. It can be shown on the Lock Screen, Notification Center, and on a paired Apple Watch.
Web apps will also be able to set a notification badge count, and notifications will also support Focus modes. If you have multiple versions of a web app on your home screen, they may have different settings; which can be useful, for example, to help separate personal and business use.
These web push notification changes were actually promised quite a long time ago, as Apple first announced web push notifications were on the way at WWDC 2022 in June.
