Looks like a case for anti trust, just like microsoft had with IE.
You must be new around here. ;-)
Microsoft used their natural monopoly in operating systems (Windows has 95% marketshare) to force OEMs (HP, Compaq, etc.) to bundle IE with their machines and not Netscape Navigator. Microsoft threaten to cancel their Windows licenses.
And later, it decided, against its decent decree with the US government, to bundle IE with Windows, claiming Windows wouldn't function without IE, which was a lie.
Perhaps you're not aware that natural monopolies are themselves not illegal; it's using that monopoly to force the market to do things it ordinarily wouldn't in some other area.
So… no, there are no antitrust issues regarding web engines on iOS. And of course, Google, Mozilla and others have browsers on the App Store that use WebKit anyway, so it would be hard to make the case they're being harmed…
Even with a low market share Apple could still theoretically be engaging in practices that are anti-consumer, such as disallowing the use of other browser engines.
Though, afaik, Apple does not stoop to the levels of Amazon, who removed the Twitch app from Roku platform for absolutely no reason other than to line their pockets with more cash.
Anti-trust is there for cases where society thinks
1) the free market doesn’t work because it is too hard for competition to enter an existing market or for existing competition to dethrone a market leader.
_and_
2) the big player(s) take (too much) advantage of their position by engaging in ‘anti-consumer’ practices.
Given the existence of Android, Apple isn’t in position 1. So, do you think (2) alone is sufficient for taking legal action? The common thinking is that the market will take care of it by by bankrupting the company doing it.
Yes, but I would say that anti-competitive behavior is inherently anti-consumer, as the consumer does not benefit from it - and Apple preventing other browser engines is both
Efficient javascript needs to be JIT'ed, but that means your app needs to be granted API access to map writeable memory as executable, which is a security risk they are not willing to grant third party developers. So a third party browser/js engine will likely be quite slow. I guess this would give users of a bad impression of iOS perfomance as a whole then, if other browser engines were allowed and became popular?
If other browser engines became very popular it says something about how bad/limited the default offering is. It usually takes a lot of work before people switch away from defaults. People continued to use IE for years for example
All OSes have bugs, and the XNU kernel certainly has had its share, so removing the ability to execute arbitrary code definitively makes exploitation of buffer overflows etc in 3rd party apps much harder.
Restricting the JS engine but allowing other browser engines to tie into it so you could leverage different browser's rendering and CSS features would be a step up and would sidestep much of the problem.
Remote execution of code is a very popular attack vector.
Apple can negate this almost entirely by controlling JavascriptCore and WebKit and ensuring that their security models e.g. sandbox are tight and well tested. Leaving that up to third parties who may not be so vigilant compromises the security of the entire device.
