A have been having a heated back and forth with @webkit and in particular Jonathan Davis, who manages the Webkit team. His response to me was to ask me why I felt I needed service workers when there were other solutions (like the deprecated app cache).
In the past I’ve had similar heated exchanges with him, asking him to support promises, fetch, and so forth. Each time his response was the same: “Show me a use case that shows why you need these”. Incidentally, that was his last reply to me regarding service workers.
You have to realize his situation. He works for Apple. He’s in Cupertino. For some background, I worked on two different ocassions for Apple in Cupertino. You are basically living in an Ivory Tower. You don’t know what’s going on outside of Apple. You aren’t exposed to other platforms. Jonathan Davis has probably only seen an Android phone in some rare social interactions. For certain he has never experienced a progressive web app on Android. So he has no idea how iOS is missing out on the PWA phenomenon.
I no longer live in California or I’d invite him out for lunch. Then hand him an Android phone with a PWA, save to home screen, put in airplane mode, etc. Then let him hit the same url on his iPhone to see how awful it is without proper support for service workers, app manifest, etc.
