> mobile Safari seems intentionally behind on PWAs
There's no such thing as a PWA. There are a dozen disparate standards, and everyone has their own idea which collection of standards constitutes a PWA.
Mobile Safari supports the absolute vast majority of those standards.
IIRC the only "major" standard from that bunch that mobile Safari didn't support was push notifications.
The still don’t support web push & notifications on ios and ipados. Even when you enable push api and notifications in experimental settings of safari it just doesn’t work.
You're not missing anything. It's not supported. That's one of the most important features.
The other thing is that no website can ask you to install it like on Android. You have to go to the "share" menu and add to homescreen. Most users don't know about that.
There's no such thing as a PWA. There are a dozen disparate standards, and everyone has their own idea which collection of standards constitutes a PWA.
Mobile Safari supports the absolute vast majority of those standards.
IIRC the only "major" standard from that bunch that mobile Safari didn't support was push notifications.