PWA not working with Screen Time/Limit Adult websites even with specific website in allow list

Question

Created Apr ’23

Replies 5

Boosts 6

Views 1.6k

Participants 5

We have developed a PWA that we encourage our users to dock to their home screen. One of our users has implemented some combination of Screen Time//Content & Privacy Restrictions/Content Restrictions/Web Content then enabling "Limit Adult websites". This breaks the PWA on both the home screen instance and within Safari. All we see is a white screen. We have tried adding the domain to the "Always Allow" section of the Screen Time Web Content screen, but we still just get a white page.

Has anyone else here had this issue? Anything we can do to work around this?

We reported this bug through feedback (FB12126097 ), but I was hoping someone else could help.

Here is the text of our feedback (from another developer on my team): Web apps that use service workers appear blank when "limit adult websites" is selected

This just started happening in iOS 16.4.1. The web content restriction, "restrict adult websites", causes applications that use service workers to break. My guess is that the cache storage API is no longer retrieving stored js/html assets. I have seen this on three different applications that use different javascript libraries. 1) Install the fastmail application from the apple app store. 2) No fastmail account is needed. You can see this on the login page. 3) Go to iOS settings -> content & privacy restrictions 4) Enable Content & Privacy Restrictions 5) Go to Content Restrictions -> Web Content and select "Limit Adult Websites" 6) Open the fastmail application. You will see a blank page/screen. 7) Go to iOS settings -> content & privacy restrictions and disable "Enable Content & Privacy Restrictions" 8) Close and re-open fastmail. You will see a login screen.

Boost

Answer 1

jascolley OP

Apr ’23

We are experiencing the same exact issue with our application and have also reported it through Feedback Assistant FB12119649. For us it is reproducible in 16.4 as well and also with any setting under Web Content restrictions other than the Unrestricted setting. We also tried adding all of our URLs for our web app to the allowed list and it does nothing.

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Answer 2

jascolley OP

Apr ’23

Just FYI, our customers that use MDM software to apply similar web content filters get the same issue.

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Answer 3

ealsmyr OP

Apr ’23

We have the same problems with customers upgrading to 16.4 on in School iPads. They are unable to use our PWA (Lexplore) due to this.

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Answer 4

KousukeA OP

May ’23

We are developing a PWA app as well and were experiencing a white screen with no connection to the site and a white screen when adult content restrictions were applied on iOS 16.4. The beta 4 of iOS 16.5, released to developers on May 2, seems to have resolved this phenomenon. Please give it a try.

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Answer 5

nkosakul OP

Oct ’23

We've been experiencing the same issue. We got fewer reports since iOS 16.5, but there are still a huge amount of user facing the whitescreen problem, even on the newer versions of iOS.

It seems that mainly MDM controlled devices are affected, even if you put nessecary urls on the white-list. Unfortunately a large amount of our users are using MDM controlled devices. On iOS devices with no restrictions at all, everything works perfectly.

Disabling service-workers is currently the only workaround. Which is not the optimal solution for us, since we would lose caching and offline functionallities.

For more context and gathered some urls, with the same issue:

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