I’m guessing that Apple will start hindering web apps because the new mouse support in iPadOS is going to be such a boon to web apps. Because of sandboxing, web apps are the only cross-platform apps that can run in their full versions on iPadOS. I wrote a quick summary of the situation[0].
Therefore, since native apps are more of a platform differentiator than web apps, moving forward we can expect Apple to start systemically hindering web apps, especially on ones that are good on iPadOS, in order to boost native apps.
(I’m not saying this necessarily the start of this, but I am saying I'm not surprised. This is exactly the type change, targeting the exact type of app I’d expect to be targeted.)
> I’m guessing that Apple will start hindering web apps because the new mouse support in iPadOS is going to be such a boon to web apps.
As a web developer, I've never believed Apple has hindered web development on their platform, purposefully or not. They just don't spend their resources adding in WebBluetooth or whatever new API-of-the-day Google has decided to come up with.
As I see it, their focus is on the user, which is why they've been slow to adopt APIs that are privacy concerns, or drain battery, or have other negative implications.
That’s a very rosy way of looking at it. iOS has had bugs with its “add to home screen” webapps that kicked around literally for years. If they were being “user first” they’d support it fully or not support it at all. Instead they implemented then neglected it.
The bugs in Apple's software, whether in web or native or in documentation are not part of some nefarious plot, its just a part of Apple's mismanagement and relatively minimal resources.
Uh, they're the most well capitalized corporation in the world (or hovering in the top 3 plus or minus a few quarters). They have the resources to make it work if they wanted. There are undoubtedly thousands of engineers, hundreds of managers, and at least a handful of execs, working for Apple, lurking in this HN thread today, not because they're unaware of their ongoing sabotage of web standards on iOS, but because they're completely aware of it and want to take the temperature on how their latest kick to the shins of PWAs is going over.
I’m fully aware of how much cash Apple has, but they’re known for having very relatively small software teams looking after whatever app needs updating that release.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Safari/WebKit was one of the larger teams within Apple dedicated to a single app.
Probably because Apple giving a crap about web apps was depreciated with the release of iPhone OS 2.0 and the App Store over a decade ago. I'd bet few users even use the "add to home screen" button outside of corporate environments that want to add a shortcut to internal sites.
Until a recent iOS release they had a number of undesirable features that made them a bit inconvenient to use: they used UIWebView (instead of the faster WKWebView), they "restarted" if you ever left them, and generally had a number of other quirks.
How is that relevant to the conversation? If it is so little-used as to be irrelevant then the user-first thing to do would be to remove the functionality but Apple haven’t.
I can speak from personal experience that users do use it when you include specific instructions on how to use it. And it’s used in a number of corporate settings for installing webapps on an iPad.
As a web developer, I've never believed Apple has hindered web development on their platform, purposefully or not. [...] As I see it, their focus is on the user, which is why they've been slow to adopt APIs that are privacy concerns, or drain battery, or have other negative implications.
As another web developer, I find this entirely unrealistic. Apple's QoI even for popular new features like the HTML5 media elements was a bug-ridden mess for years before they fixed even basic problems. Conveniently, having managed to break the de facto standard for serving video on the web that had been working for years up to that point (Flash players), that left native apps as the only reliable way to do a lot of even quite simple things you might want to do with multimedia content. There is a deep irony that some of the breakage was because they were playing those media elements through effectively a separate plugin of their own that wasn't properly integrated into Safari and consequently broke other basic web behaviours like cookies.
At this point, the idea that Apple's motivations for the constant breakage and even severe regression of web functionality on iOS devices are entirely altruistic and for the benefit of their users is about as credible as Google and Facebook lobbying for privacy regulations because they want to decrease tracking on the Internet.
Just to be clear, Apple didn't kill Flash, mobile killed Flash.
I don't think that generalisation is warranted.
Apple refused to support Flash at all, meaning everyone who wanted to provide (among other things) audio/video content had to switch to the nascent HTML5 functionality, which was at that time and for some years afterwards inferior to Flash in almost every way except availability.
In that situation, it made little sense to invest in better Flash support on Android as it was presumably seen as a dying technology. However, there was no inherent reason why Flash couldn't have been improved to use less battery in the same way that the browsers themselves were, or that Flash could not have taken advantage of better hardware support on mobile devices for computationally expensive tasks like video decoding as this became available with newer devices.
This revisionist history, of seeing people wanting the proprietary Flash to come back, is crazy.
There's nothing revisionist in saying that people wanted A/V content on their sites, that Flash player had been by far the dominant way of providing that content up to that point, or that the then-new HTML5 alternatives were also very poor in quality and performance on mobile for several years afterwards.
Remember how for several years everyone with iPhones couldn't watch the videos on a lot of websites, and how excited people were when the big video hosting sites started adding HTML5 players and, in time, support for better codecs? Probably many of those people had no idea what Flash or HTML5 even were, so I don't suppose they did "want Flash to come back", but they certainly weren't happy that they couldn't watch videos on websites like everyone else.
Be careful what you wish for! I don't for an instant believe that Apple's motivations here are purely for their users' benefit, but their actions do at least tend to have some beneficial effect on privacy. Letting them suffocate so Google's spyware-laden ecosystem becomes the only viable way to access the web on mobile devices would not be an improvement.
In my opinion only we ourselves can save ourselves from Google. By using things like AdNauseam and educating everyone and their dog about ad blockers.
I don't think the way to fix ad bullshit is to close down everything, I do think it's in opening everything and educating everyone. That way people actually win, not corps, as it should be.
moving forward we can expect Apple to start systemically hindering web apps
They have been doing this for quite some time now. Always ostensibly to protect users but always also conveniently putting webapps at a permanent disadvantage to native apps.
For my part I'm not interested in being a user of a platform so hostile to the web that it disallows any third party browsers.
> Always ostensibly to protect users but always also conveniently putting webapps at a permanent disadvantage to native apps.
This isn't always a bad thing though. For example, Safari has prohibited some obnoxious behavior that Chrome has allowed: Autoplaying videos, tab suspension, push notifications. These hog CPU and destroy battery life, worsening the user experience.
Remember, making everything a web app is Google's agenda because they benefit most from it.
I would just point out there are very valid use cases for these things, i.e. push notifications are very useful to me (from certain apps). The problem is one of consent.
Interesting. I can tell Safari to not autoplay videos on YouTube in its preferences, but that doesn't seem to do anything. Seems more like a bug on Safari's part and/or workaround on Google's part than anything deliberate.
Safari uses some sort of algorithm to determine whether you actually want the autoplay to happen.
For example I've noticed that if you play a video on a website during that session, it will allow autoplay from scripts on that page (not 3rd party) for the rest of that session. Same for unmuting an autoplaying video.
This is all undocumented though and through personal observations, as Apple seemed to stop posting Safari documentation years ago.
Technically they could blacklist certain behaviors from certain sites. They and all other major browsers already do this in a privacy-preserving way for Safe Browsing, certificate revocation, etc.
Blacklisting is a losing game, especially from the malicious sites most likely to abuse this. Notice how those malware and fake Chrome extension ads have a new URL every day.
So it's not about what's best for the user but what's best for Apple? I wouldn't call that "understandable". All this is doing is contributing to webkit monoculture.
There's some irony that Apple forcing the use of Safari on iOS is creating a monoculture when, were the restriction lifted, everyone would be using Chrome.
I'd be amazed if there were more than a tiny fraction of iOS/iPadOS users (of which there are hundreds of millions) who weren't perfectly ok with Mobile Safari for their everyday usage.
[I'm probably the "target market" for Chrome (backend, occasionally frontend developer) and there's no way I'd have it on my phone. I only suffer the GMail app because they've made IMAP usage of gmail unreliable.]
It doesn’t matter what users choose, devs would badger users into using Chrome for their own convenience. It’d be the return of the “viewed best in” badges from the late 90s and early 00s.
I believe that OP is saying it would be preferable to have blink-everywhere than to have a deliberately-crippled Apple web browser with all other choices banned.
Agreed. There is no choice with IOS: you choose the same WebKit that they've chosen, or Safari. One engine and version, or one browser using that one engine.
You can install any browser you want from playstore or outside of playstore. There are no restrictions on what you can and cannot have on your phone on android.
Yet non-default browsers on Android are non-existent. So in practice Android has the same web-engine mono-culture as iPhone. Given how successfully Google was able to ensure Blink domination on desktop and even more so on Android it is very understandable what Apple has done. And for me having at least 2 web engines on mobile is better than 1.
In what reality-distortioned world is that worse than 0%? Also, several of those Blink-based browsers include additional non-Google-approved features, like Mozilla's own Firefox Focus, Samsung Browser, Edge, and Brave. I'd hardly call that a monoculture just because they share the same lineage.
If this were true, how would you explain the recent improvements to Safari on the iPad that make it as capable as desktop Safari. Until last year Google Docs did not work in Safari on the iPad. Now it works very well indeed. The same is true of most web apps.
This particular move takes something that is possible in web applications today and makes it not possible in the future (offline capable frontend-only applications), making the gap between native applications and browser applications further, so developers who need to build apps that works offline on iPhone, will only be able to use Apples own technologies for doing so, in a non-cross-platform way. Which in general, is what Apple always been favoring.
Google Docs doesn't really work offline, so it's not impacted by this change. Could also be a change of heart from Apple, since their stance on web applications have changed before.
People who want to track users will always find a way to do so, it's a endless cat-and-mouse game. Now they will just use cookies instead... The only way to win this is to legislate away the freedom to track users by using privacy-invasive methods. That's the only way that will work long-term. But that'll make half of the internet industry disappear, along with it's shareholders, so it's unlikely to happen.
Now I'm not a native English speaker, but seems "arbitrary" means "determined by chance, whim, or impulse, and not by necessity, reason, or principle". Introducing a law to protect peoples privacy would not be arbitrary, especially since most countries have a due process for introducing laws.
They could restrict these APIs to "installed" web apps via the web app manifest file, if they were to adopt that. Maybe they will in the future, but for now they've just made web apps far less powerful.
This is a great point with a simple explanation: How good Safari was on iPad was irrelevant before mouse support. Before mouse support, we had apps made with UIKit, which is a touch-first app framework, competing with web apps, which are keyboard-and-mouse first. So UIKit apps won, because UIKit apps are better for touch. With mouse support, that situation becomes exactly inverted: In UIKit apps, the keyboard and mouse are secondary, so web apps have the advantage in being keyboard-and-mouse first.
So now that web apps have the advantage, at least when a keyboard and mouse are attached to the iPad, Apple is going to be seeking to tip the scales back in native apps favor.
We’re all speculating about Apple’s motivation, but none of us really knows why Apple made its decision. Perhaps it’s best to focus on the trade-offs—privacy vs. functionality—and not the speculative Kremlinology.
Respectfully, no. Learning software is a big investment in time and effort. Since I'm on Apple's platforms, because I think they're the best compromise for running the software I want to run, I am going to continue to speculate their reasoning to try to predict which software will be successful on their platforms in the future, because that's how I choose where to invest my time and effort.
I respect you have some other motivations here, but I'm not doing this for fun. I'm doing this because it's important to how I spend my most important resources: my time and effort. So no, I'm not going to stop speculating, the mere idea is laughable. Like buying an individual stock while having no opinion of what direction the company might take in the future.
Of course you are free to speculate, but my point was that we lack evidence of Apple’s motivations that would help us to make predictions of any value. All we can do is tell a plausible story, and without evidence your story is no more likely to be true than mine.
The people who work on making websites function better on iPad are literally a 20 second walk away from the people who work in Intelligent Tracking Prevention–do you really think that they'd seek to undermine each other in this way?
Absolutely, do you have evidence they are talking and consulting with each other? Obviously lack of evidence isn't evidence either, but departments do things all the time that are at odds with each other in companies like Apple.
Which is strange, because they're already under scrutiny for being anti-competitive WRT their app ecosystem. Having good support for web apps could've softened that case a little bit.
I have nothing against hybrid apps. In many use cases, they are the best approach, and I have often declined business, in recommending them to others, as opposed to what I can do.
My post was not an attack on anyone or anything, and it was not being snarky. All I said was that I develop native apps, and that this policy does not affect me.
I like developing native apps. I've been writing native Apple software for 34 years. It's not really difficult; just different. I have also been developing "Internet" software, of all kinds (full stack), since before the WWW. Using Apple stuff. It certainly can be done.
Therefore, since native apps are more of a platform differentiator than web apps, moving forward we can expect Apple to start systemically hindering web apps, especially on ones that are good on iPadOS, in order to boost native apps.
(I’m not saying this necessarily the start of this, but I am saying I'm not surprised. This is exactly the type change, targeting the exact type of app I’d expect to be targeted.)
[0]: https://blog.robenkleene.com/2020/03/20/ipadoss-new-mouse-su...