The tech press continues to miss the biggest iOS anti-trust thrust: browsers. The press, that is, with the exception of The Register:
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The idea of an open, capable, interoperable platform that delivers high-functioning apps is *such* a threat that Apple is trying to undermine the web's potential from every single one of those angles. It's working in standards and quasi-standards bodies to keep the web less capable, using blocking position on iOS to prevent breakout of a capable web, and talking down the benefits of interoperability.
Glactic-scale gaslighting to protect profits, not users.
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The geofencing and legal angles aren't easy to parse, but here's the status quo. Apple:
- Delivered an SDK that doesn't work on developer phones outside the EU
- Proposed legal terms that are *bonkers*
- Doesn't use the same APIs for their own browser
- Is refusing to provide APIs to support PWAs and PWA capabilities
- Won't let anyone ship a real browser outside the EU, even if all of that was acceptable. Which it isn't.These are defense lines. To defend what? The App Store.
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And it's just worth remembering how far behind the web on iOS is.
Android users have WebGPU *today*. And View Transitions. And the navigation API. And scroll-linked animations. And content-visibility. And Custom Paint. And Web Transport. And Web HID, Web USB, Web Bluetooth, Web NFC, Web MIDI, and Trusted Types.
Not to mention functional Web Push:
Web Push on iOS - 1 year anniversary - Webventures
TL;DR: Web Push on iOS is nearing its one year anniversary. It's still mostly useless.
Webventures (webventures.rejh.nl)
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✧✦✶✷Catherine✷✶✦✧replied to Alex Russell last edited by
@slightlyoff have you seen me program an FPGA with Web USB from my phone?
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Alex Russellreplied to ✧✦✶✷Catherine✷✶✦✧ last edited by
@whitequark This is incredible!
/cc @tomayac
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@slightlyoff I bet the second WebGPU is supported in iOS Safari, games will immediately start bypassing app stores.
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@slightlyoff and wasm-gc
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Alex Russellreplied to Bret Mogilefsky last edited by
@mogul There's a reason Apple won't engage on PWA installation UI or APIs, and plays dumb every time they come up in standards venues. The inimitable @brucelawson lays it out here:
Bruce Lawson's personal site
Bruce Lawson's blog, focussing on web accessibility, web standards, travellers tales, and music
(brucelawson.co.uk)
Capabilities + distribution == a threat to the app store. So they're undermining both, hoping nobody notices.
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@lispwitch How could I forget!
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Bret Mogilefskyreplied to Alex Russell last edited by
@slightlyoff @brucelawson Yup, absolutely! I called this when PlayStation was first looking at handheld gaming models in parallel with the rise of mobile games... It was pretty clear that eventually a standards-compliant browser would be table-stakes for any mobile device with a screen, that the web was going to be a target "platform" for middleware, and that at that point PlayStation's value-add would have to be the best storefront for gamers, and the best services for game developers.
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Thomas Steiner :chrome:replied to Alex Russell last edited by
@slightlyoff @whitequark Yes, I saw this. It's pretty incredible indeed.
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Alex Russellreplied to Bret Mogilefsky last edited by [email protected]
@mogul @brucelawson Apple foot-dragging on WebGL2 for, like, 8 years (Chromium engineers eventually wrote a lot of the code, even after the fork!) should have been a scandal that got continual coverage.
Instead, you've got The Verge et al. covering stuff like the Vision Pro and never asking why WebGPU and WebXR aren't available and why PWAs can't be installed. Neat-total abdication the challenge Apple's preferred business structure.
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@mogul s/Safari/iOS/
Apple's blocking *any* browser from delivering better PWAs there, Safari or not.
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Max Lee :blobcatverified:replied to Alex Russell last edited by
@slightlyoff Pretty sure Web HID/USB/Bluetooth/NFC/MIDI are all Google-exclusive as they seem to just ignore all the security issues with the way it's designed...
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@slightlyoff
If you try to make much more than a trivial web assembly app in safari (and on iOS everything is safari, even chrome) it terminates the app with no warning, making it look like it crashed.The limit is undocumented but appears to be around 300mb for code and data.
The only reason they would do this is to push people to the app store.. no other platform has this limit.
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Alex Russellreplied to Max Lee :blobcatverified: last edited by
@the_moep This is one of the silliest things I've read in a long time.
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@tony I hadn't heard this. iOS has aggressive memory culling for processes...could it be that?