1. Apple has started rejecting Electron apps from their app store.
2. Apple's "Hotel Cupertino" - you can bring any browser you want, but you can never leave Safari. (That is, the iOS versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox are merely glorified Safari skins; Apple doesn't allow independent browsers on their platform.)
3. Apple ignores, or is slowest to implement, open web standards like RTC, progressive web apps, push, and more.
As someone involved in the progressive web app (PWA) standards space, I unfortunately must concur with the author's observations: Apple is soft-suppressing web standards, especially in the PWA space.
> That is, the iOS versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox are simply Safari skins; Apple doesn't allow independent browser on their platform.
I don't like Apple's policy, but my understanding is that's not exactly right. It's the web browser engine that must be WebKit, like Safari. But browsers can have some other differences beyond the "skin" like networking code, and my understanding is at least Chrome does.
No MS was sued for much more like forcing third party OEMs not to bundle Netscape and forcing them to pay for Windows for all of their PCs whether or not they shipped with Windows.
Yes. Why haven't they been fined for anti-competetive practices already? How can they still force developers to use their only webkit implementation? Is it because people think there are more browsers on iOS, forgetting that actual layouting, rendering and scripting, most of the web browser work is done in the single Apple's implementation? Also online video streaming providers are forced to encode in HEVC, because Apple refuses to support royalty-free VP9 and AV1, despite the fact that even HW implementation of VP9 is available for some time already in many SoCs and Intels (and chips with AV1 are being produced now as well). Microsoft was fined a lot in the past, forced to ask people for app defaults (full-featured alternatives), but Apple seems to have some special treating... and people don't care. As long as Apple says it's "for their security" (which is not true), they believe it. It's sad.
How do feel about ChromeOS? You can't really bring a fully independent browser there either - you have the Android APIs but they make for a pretty crappy desktop browser experience.
I don't believe it is even the engine must be WebKit; it is that third parties can't implement a JIT-optimized Javascript engine like JavaScriptCore.
So the browsers are stuck with either abysmal performance numbers due to interpreted javascript, supporting their engine having different javascript behavior on iOS, or shipping a skin over webkit. The skin approach is by far the least amount of engineering.
What’s good for google doesn’t mean it’s good for user. Google doesn’t own any operating system (that hs a market share) and they are doing everything to destroy ideas of operating systems
> Apple is soft-suppressing web standards, especially in the PWA space.
Yeah, yeah, when the PWA community screams “JUMP”, Apple is supposed to ask “How high?”.
Never mind that this is a tiny subset of the entire web cosmos.
I build web apps for a living, and I don’t use a single PWA on iPhone/iPad. I’m sure Apple has noticed that these kind of features are going mostly unused on their devices, and are prioritising accordingly.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d be happy to see Apple make PWA stuff more a priority, but I can’t really blame them for not prioritising it higher.
1. Apple has started rejecting Electron apps from their app store.
2. Apple's "Hotel Cupertino" - you can bring any browser you want, but you can never leave Safari. (That is, the iOS versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox are merely glorified Safari skins; Apple doesn't allow independent browsers on their platform.)
3. Apple ignores, or is slowest to implement, open web standards like RTC, progressive web apps, push, and more.
As someone involved in the progressive web app (PWA) standards space, I unfortunately must concur with the author's observations: Apple is soft-suppressing web standards, especially in the PWA space.