Specifically, could you list features that would be relevant to a PWA that takes your electoral division as input and returns information on who to vote for?
Honestly I'm confused that if a PWA is a viable solution, why this isn't just a website?
Such PWA is easy to block because the government can block a website with it.
A native app can use push notifications (which are encrypted) to receive data and the only way to block such an app would be to block access to Apple's servers completely.
> Such PWA is easy to block because the government can block a website with it.
They can also block whichever server is hosting the API native apps connect to. Doesn't seem much of a win for native on that front, unless the data is stored permanently on device.
The app in question ("Navalny app") has a blog and voting recommendations. You can distribute information with app updates or use push notifications to transmit data (for example, new API server IP address and public key).
For example, when government tried to block Telegram, it used push notifications to send addresses of new (not yet blocked) servers to the app (of course, you can send different addresses to different devices). It helped Telegram to evade blocking and it worked.
As I understand, you cannot do it with PWA, especially if the browser doesn't encrypt DNS requests.
So with native apps the only way to block them is either block App Store completely or push on Apple to remove the app.
If the browser supports encrypted DNS and hiding SNI (which needs TLS >= 1.3) then there are chances to evade blocking with PWA. But as I understand, Safari doesn't use encrypted DNS by default (I wonder why).
The government might have only pretended that it really tried to block Telegram. The app was never removed from stores, and since both G and A did comply with such requests before abd after, I suspect that such request was never sent in the first place.
> Honestly I'm confused that if a PWA is a viable solution, why this isn't just a website?
PWA was touted in the comments as a possible alternative, but PWA on iOS is not a very viable alternative to a native app in my view.
Just because a native app could be a PWA which in turn could be a website doesn't really say much about which of these it actually should be. Most apps I use on a daily basis could technically be websites, but that misses the point of why we like using platform-native apps in the first place.
> Just because a native app could be a PWA which in turn could be a website doesn't really say much about which of these it actually should be.
It's worth mentioning that Navalny's team is funded via donations, and they could poll whether PWA is a viable option for communicating with their audience.
Honestly I'm confused that if a PWA is a viable solution, why this isn't just a website?