This might technically work, but is an absurdly user-unfriendly.
Name a modern game that required you to manually manage game state files, let alone didn’t have autosave. It’s a feature users expect, and they’re going to have a bad time. I don’t want to play a quick game on my phone and have to remember to save and where I am keeping my save files.
I’d argue a far better options would be just to treat local storage as a permission like camera or microphones.
While I agree that it’s ideal to treat localstorage as a permission, as someone who has played a lot of games over the years I can tell you that I wish I could manually manage game state files.
The current way iOS does it (either keep the game installed forever or erase all your progress when deleting it) is a huge barrier to me getting invested in iOS games at all.
With “save progress to file” (and loading), I would be a lot more comfortable.
I would still want autosave though. No way do I want to go back to the era of “oh all my work for the past 6 hours is just gone?”
Our suggestions are not mutually exclusive options. Both can coexist if the developers are ready for the implementation burden.
The issue with the permission model is there has to be a mechanism to prevent overuse which I believe is always worked around by annoying the user with the prompt as often as possible until they concede.
I don’t even play games but I wouldn’t expect a web game to store all of its metadata in my local storage. I would expect it to store data on their own severs and only store active gameplay information locally.
My browser storage is not a game developers long term storage, its a cache.
Cookies can be used for storage for up to a year, but it’s commonly accepted that browsers vary in implementation of this based on user settings. So why wouldn’t user settings exist for other kinds of permanent or session storage? Google Chrome is so dominant in both browser-making and standards-making that we’ve forgotten the browser — and user — is always king when it comes to the web. If users want permanent storage they will use alternative browsers for those particular sites. And while site authors can block Safari with a prompt, it’s then up to users to change browsers. Presumably for developers these will have knobs to tweak so local storage can continue working in alternative browsers on iOS the way it always has. Presumably Safari will eventually get a config toggle for this setting if it isn’t already there. Users already don’t notice when browser history is cleared, though advanced users will configure this by following instructions on Google. Same here.
> Google Chrome is so dominant in both browser-making and standards-making that we’ve forgotten the browser — and user — is always king when it comes to the web. If users want permanent storage they will use alternative browsers for those particular sites.
No, they generally won't. There also aren't really any "alternative browsers" on iOS, they're all Webkit-based.
> So why wouldn’t user settings exist for other kinds of permanent or session storage?
Nobody is saying there shouldn't be any settings or consent in this regard. What we get here is not a setting, we get one major player deciding that there will be no way to properly implement offline web apps on their platform.
I disagree that there’s no way to implement an alternative to Safari, besides Chrome there’s also iCab and other browsers that show not only a completely different UI but also innovative new features. Even if WebKit makes it impossible to remove this restriction, a third-party browser could find a way to intercept calls and keep its own local storage, read and backup native local storage, or provide other means to local storage via proprietary JS APIs, and if that browser is Chrome, it will gain traction. Especially if Apple changes iOS to allow users to change default apps.
Why? Are you paying for it? To you, it's trivial amount of data that you can wipe if you somehow desperately need the 1mb, to them it quickly adds up to significant costs.
I find this position absurd, just like the suggestion that everyone should start programming complicated user hostile save flows.
The article as well as my concern here is not about the browser proper but web apps like you install onto your phone and one of the major points of is that they work offline despite t
Name a modern game that required you to manually manage game state files, let alone didn’t have autosave. It’s a feature users expect, and they’re going to have a bad time. I don’t want to play a quick game on my phone and have to remember to save and where I am keeping my save files.
I’d argue a far better options would be just to treat local storage as a permission like camera or microphones.