This is why Apple holds back important APIs from their browser, years after they are available in other browsers: fast 3D graphics, offline storage and compute, push notifications, to name a few.
Apple also holds this sort of features back on their browser on the open desktop platform (macOS). Judging from that I'd say there must be another reason.
Yes, the feature that massively reduces friction for paying for things on the web for which Apple collects about 1/200th the fee that they do when you buy in their store.
If you are a web app developer who wants users to pay you, Apple Pay is awesome in that it takes away a lot of friction.
Good. The "browser is a mini-OS" metaphor has proven to be an absolutely terrible experience for both developers and end-users. Time to find another way.
The comment was not unsubstantial, nor was it “clever” in the way you suggest was attempted. Cigarettes were quite a popular market driven product for literally decades. The point being, obviously, that “the market decides” isn’t necessarily a good way to determine or identify quality, or what consumers actually want or need.
The "what about cigarettes?" argument would be relevant if one of the market participants in this scenario was literally killing people (or otherwise harming society in some way).
An honest reader would not interpret my pro-free-market comment as being 100% absolute in any and all circumstances. An honest reader would consider the context. You're not arguing in good faith.
> An honest reader would not interpret my pro-free-market comment as being 100% absolute in any and all circumstances.
FWIW, based on my experience, whenever I see Americans arguing pro-free-market, I am going to assume that they genuinely argue in absolutes. ("FWIW" because I can see from your profile that you're Canadian.)
Generally fair I guess, but extending the argument from electronics all the way to something as universally reviled as cigarettes? That's quite a leap! I mean, why stop there? Why not flame throwers and ballistic missiles? :-)
This is exactly the kind of thing that makes me want to participate less and less in online discussion. HN's rules require people to interpret comments charitably but it's still full of stuff like this. It's exhausting.
I just don't have the energy for it anymore and honestly that makes me quite sad.
Yes. To avoid the crappification of mobile, where everything it's a bunch of slow, memory and battery draining Electron apps, doing whatever they want, each with custom UI...
Definitely that and not to avoid the potential for circumventing their lock-in. If Apple were that obsessed with performance, their LLVM backends wouldn't be closed source.
How is that not what exists? Aren't many apps based on web technologies, and/or have custom UIs? There's little standardisation even among 'real' native apps.
>How is that not what exists? Aren't many apps based on web technologies, and/or have custom UIs?
Yes, but
(a) some, as opposed to all which is the dream of the pro web-app camp.
(b) forbidding custom JS and web engines helps keep this low
(c) even the crappy mobile-webview apps at least have to be wrapped in an app container, be installable and uninstallable the same way, be notarized, use the same payment system with central control, and be tied to the same policies (e.g. regarding privacy, notifications, use of apis) as native mobile apps
And for how long would Safari on iOS keep up with new features or not get its performance nuked if for example games started to move into browser apps in major numbers on iOS. Apple itself said in the trial that games pretty much subsidize all other apps in terms of the money Apple makes out of the App Store.
iOS Safari already lags behind in features. Apple would just make it even worse if it started to cost them significant amount of money to have a truly great web browser.
Because it's Apple's incentive to offer a good web browser to sell very expensive devices? The same incentive Microsoft has to make Edge and Google has to make Chrome for Android. They do not have a god-given right to make money on every piece of software that happens to run on devices they sell.
Besides, this wouldn't be an issue in the first place if other web rendering engines weren't forbidden on ios. Google / Mozilla could have their own browsers that aren't just safari reskins.
> Apple itself said in the trial that games pretty much subsidize all other apps in terms of the money Apple makes out of the App Store.
How does that work? It's not like Apple spent money to develop the games or the apps. And they are diverting money from the profitable games to the unprofitable apps. So how, exactly, are the games subsidizing the apps?
1. The web should be able to control everything (i.e. PWA features not normally found in a browser).
2. Google should control the web (they can index it, track, monetize it, but it has to be on the web).
3. Profit.
Do you think Apple users are super excited at the prospect of most apps turning into battery-draining non-native shitty experiences, instead of using the iOS frameworks? No, they're not.
And push notifications on iOS work as a service, to avoid battery drain, they all go through Apple on a single connection. This is free for all native apps. It can't be implemented for web apps both for technical reasons and because web apps can't be curated, so it'll just be abused like there's no tomorrow.
Have you noticed on the desktop that EVERY SITE asks you for push notifications? This is super annoying and bless your soul if you ever clicked "YES" on any of those. They'll spam you until you die, or eventually ask your nephew to reset your permissions.
EVERY single feature not in Safari, has a reason not to be there. And I'm sick of everyone eating up Google's propaganda and becoming their tools in this. I don't mind Google at all, they should fight for their PoV on all this, and they have a right to expand their business.
But not at the expense of Apple or Apple's users. F that.
Long-time iOS developer here who does not want cross-platform dreck to become the standard. UIKit and SwiftUI are deep frameworks that let you build really great user experiences (if you're willing to put in the work to learn them), and Apple spends a ton of time and money making sure they can work together and build an iOS app that looks and feels like an iOS app, not someone's crappy "web site in a native wrapper" or "several extra layers of abstraction to hide an API and god help you if you need to debug an API problem" approach.
I'm honestly glad to see one dev who cares about their craft and not just "I wanna spit some HTML and boom, it's on all phones".
HN is mostly frequented by developers, and it's so frustrating to see how many of them are outright lazy and don't think about UX but rather about how to get quickest from point A to point B.
Rest assured most phone users are with you all the way. But again, we wouldn't know it reading developer forums.
What you are ignoring (and in a pretty condescending way if I may say so) is that the best allocation of limited resources in the interest of users is not always to create scores of native client apps and device integrations. It's not all laziness.
Sometimes it's politics (I had a colleague leave a job because the new director of development mandated they rewrite their flagship enterprise apps in React Native because he got a song and dance from a React Native trainer/consultant and wouldn't listen to the people who knew what they were talking about).
Sometimes it's different priorities (a meetup buddy of mine some years ago had to write apps in PhoneGap because "We're in the oil bidness, not the app badness").
It isn't always "the best allocation of limited resources", either. Apart from having to do extra work to make the UX close to native (which isn't trivial), using a "cross platform" solution means you've just included a giant third party dependency that you don't control or maintain. Call it FUD if you want to, but in the forty-odd years I've done programming/development that's never been a good bet. If resources are really limited, the best bet is to have a decent design and very clear (reasonable) expectations and pay someone good to execute them.
I still mourn the loss of Windows Phone (aka one of three mobile OS choices) because of the "app gap". Small developers wouldn't invest the time or money into porting their app to the small marketshare. Even worse though, large companies would let their apps flounder, if they had one at all; the Bank of America app was simply disabled rather than being updated.
If the PWA concept had caught on, users on all platforms would have an equally good UX, increasing user choice.
If you visit a site a lot, you want to install an icon for it. If you're willing to install an icon for it, you prefer the quality and speed of a native experience. That's just common sense.
Funny enough I couldn't find a decent native app for HN, so I just placed a link to the site in my folder with social apps. That site is the worst thing in that folder.
I know a couple people who dislike Reddit's degraded web experience to drive users to their app. I haven't installed the app myself. Maybe it's a minority opinion. But supposedly Reddit has 1.6 billion unique visitors per month, and about 120 million app installs.
Judging by their non-degraded desktop site experience, thank god we have the app. Honestly, Reddit is one of those sites that make me think the world has collectively forgotten how to make a sane site. It takes seconds to load, and almost everything you go means looking at animated placeholders for a time, until something happens.
I have a workstation that deals with 3D rendering and huge Photoshop files, or compiling sizable projects with no problem, and my CPU is still pegged to 100% when I browse Reddit.
I shudder at the thought of those same people being in charge of my mobile experience. I don't feel like having to replace my phone battery every 3 months, thanks.
> apps turning into battery-draining non-native shitty experiences
There is no reason why non-native apps should be a shitty experience that drains the battery. That is just a tooling/feature issue.
> Have you noticed on the desktop that EVERY SITE asks you for push notifications? This is super annoying and bless your soul if you ever clicked "YES" on any of those. They'll spam you until you die, or eventually ask your nephew to reset your permissions.
The spam for installing the native app is 10x worse when using a mobile browser.
I don’t know about “only Google”, but Apple feels that web push in its current form doesn’t benefit the user (at least, how most browsers currently implement it where every page can ask you for notification privileges). They could gate the functionality behind PWA install, but right now they don’t.
I don't see how this restriction benefits anyone but Apple. What this restriction does is replace an annoyance that doesn't benefit Apple with one that does.
Instead of websites asking to send notifications, they are now nagging us to install useless apps that ask to send notifications and clutter our screens. An honest curator would never even allow these apps into their app store.
This is purely a business decision on Apple's part, nothing to do with user interests at all.
So you're annoyed by a few dozen apps you've installed sending notifications that "clutter your screen", and the solution is to allow the thousands of sites you visit do the same.
No, you don't understand. What annoys me is that Apple has created an additional incentive for companies to clutter my screen with useless apps that wouldn't have any reason to be apps if it wasn't for push notifications.
These "apps" should never be allowed in the app store. They should be websites that get to ask me exactly once whether I want to receive their notifications. Instead they keep pushing and nagging me to install their apps and Apple's policies are encouraging this behaviour.
In some cases, the notifications are useful, but there is no other reason for them to be apps installed on my device.
I want some sites to send me notifications just like I want some apps to send me notifications. I don't want websites to turn themselves into otherwise useless apps just to be able to send me notifications.
I’ve haven’t met any "feature" on desktop Chrome I wish existed on Safari on iOS but don’t and I browse the web few hours a day from mobile. If anything, web browsers are bloated enough already and should remove features or fix the existing ones before adding news things.
Exactly, which is what makes their argument so flimsy.
Sure sometimes apps get promotion and featured by the store but for the vast majority of apps, any downloads they get have about as much to do with Apple as the results of your web searches do.
They do charge additional fees, just not to customers. Those fees get tacked onto the bank/merchant in the transaction. Apple charges between 0.15% to 0.30% of total transaction, according to Financial Times.
