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Why we are suing Apple for better HTML5 support in iOS

nexedi.com

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Re: Why we are suing Apple for better HTML5 support in iOS

#211

Post by ac29 »

natch wrote: post #185

To Nexedi, if you're reading this discussion: As you know Apple these days has devices and platforms to which users entrust a tremendous amount of very personal and often private data. Therefore, Apple is relatively careful about security issues, and slow to introduce features that may open holes that expose users' private data. Your entire blog post does not even once mention the word security. It seems this concept…

>It seems this concept does not even enter your thinking at all as an explanation for why Apple must be very conservative about adding the types of functionalities you list.

Read the article again -- I don't think they are asking Apple to add more HTML5 functionality, they are asking Apple to allow other browsers which have already implemented the functionality they need onto iOS. Their legal team thinks French law is on their side.

The security thing is a bit of a strawman, you are implying that Google, Mozilla, or Microsoft, who all have better HTML5 support, do not take browser security seriously. That's simply not true.

Re: Why we are suing Apple for better HTML5 support in iOS

#212

Post by amelius »

coldtea wrote: post #206
amelius wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If someone wants first-class support, build for the OS. Yes, that was my argument: Apple is favoring native apps. Developing native apps helps Apple further build and exploit its ecosystem, and pushes us further down the rabbit hole.

> Yes, that was my argument: Apple is favoring native apps. Yes, but one can make it sound like a conspiracy, when it's in fact a DUH!

Lots of things are "duh" in hindsight.

Re: Why we are suing Apple for better HTML5 support in iOS

#213

Post by baybal2 »

amelius wrote: post #129
coldtea wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From ordinary users, nobody cares about the web platform on mobile. Native apps are faster, with better integration to platform APIs and features, lighter on battery, and consistent (even if a large part of an app is just a webview in a native app shell). And for developers, they can actually be monetized and attract paying users, unlike mobile browser-based apps. Safari on mobile is pretty up to date as mobile techn…

> From ordinary users, nobody cares about the web platform on mobile. Native apps are faster Well, that's a problem right there. Instead of helping the web forward, Apple is keeping the web and web-apps second-class citizens. And of course this helps their own app platform and app store to be successful, and as a bonus it keeps developers within the walls of their garden.

> From ordinary users, nobody cares about the web platform on mobile. Native apps are faster

> All iPhone apps are web apps (C) S. Jobs

ヽ( ´¬`)ノ

Re: Why we are suing Apple for better HTML5 support in iOS

#214

Post by baybal2 »

amelius wrote: post #129
coldtea wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From ordinary users, nobody cares about the web platform on mobile. Native apps are faster, with better integration to platform APIs and features, lighter on battery, and consistent (even if a large part of an app is just a webview in a native app shell). And for developers, they can actually be monetized and attract paying users, unlike mobile browser-based apps. Safari on mobile is pretty up to date as mobile techn…

> From ordinary users, nobody cares about the web platform on mobile. Native apps are faster Well, that's a problem right there. Instead of helping the web forward, Apple is keeping the web and web-apps second-class citizens. And of course this helps their own app platform and app store to be successful, and as a bonus it keeps developers within the walls of their garden.

> From ordinary users, nobody cares about the web platform on mobile. Native apps are faster

> All iPhone apps are web apps (C) S. Jobs

ヽ( ´¬`)ノ

Re: Why we are suing Apple for better HTML5 support in iOS

#215

Post by Normal_gaussian »

stephenr wrote: post #207
Normal_gaussian wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends how you define the market. If we look countrywide [0] France has ~20% iOS, here in the UK we have ~40%. But the product my company is selling (in the UK) is currently faced with a OS distribution of ~80% iOS and ~20% Android (some small number of web only clients). Why? We hypothesise that our customers have greater cashflow than the average Brit and as such the iPhone is much more popular choice. I…

By your logic I could release an iOS only app and then claim iOS has a 100% monopoly because no one uses my app on android. As for the background processes: that's by design. Only specific types of apps that have legitimate broad-appeal use cases for background processes (eg voip apps) are allowed. There is a reason Apple products have high customer satisfaction survey results: a product is not just whatever shit you…

No you have completely misunderstood 'my logic'.

I was illustrating how product share depends on the market definition. I did not give a definition for a monopoly. This illustration could showed both that the parent comments' statistic is irrelevant/incorrect and that the market share is likely to vary significantly across a geographical population.

As for the background processes. I know that is by design. Believe it or not we are allowed by Apple to run our background process in a similar vein to most other Apps. Unfortunately the background process mechanism is not reliable enough for us. Hence why I said 'reliable'. Apple have no intention of improving this situation as we are not a large enough revenue stream.

Re: Why we are suing Apple for better HTML5 support in iOS

#216

Post by jbob2000 »

My company builds software applications for hospitals and healthcare providers. Across the board, we have stopped recommending Apple devices for solutions.

Some of our applications use the headphone jack to communicate with our apps (we take readings from an Ultrasound, for example). Without a headphone jack, this solution is dead in the water. The unknowns around how this will work on future iOS devices is too risky for us to invest in.

The app review process is brutal for project management. Our clients run studies and trials on our software and we need to be able to say to them "yes, your app will be on the store on this day". And if we need to make an update, I need to be able to say that the update will be available at a specific date. Submitting apps and patches into the Apple wormhole and praying it doesn't take two weeks to come out the other side is a huge risk for us.

We just sent 60 android phones to Africa for an HIV study. If these were iPhones, it would have cost close to $50,000 for the devices alone. But we picked up 60 Samsung Galaxy Cores for $100 a pop and they work perfectly (they stopped making Cores around the same time the iPhone 5 came out). Android devices seem to age much more gracefully than iOS devices. I feel much more confident advising a hospital to purchase 100 Android devices than I do iPads.

Re: Why we are suing Apple for better HTML5 support in iOS

#217

Post by pier25 »

coldtea wrote: post #104
kyriakos wrote: post #81

Many of the HTML5 technologies Apple is steering clear from make the Web more App like meaning they become a threat to their dominance with the App Store on their own platform. The longer they take to adopt them the longer they can benefit from the exclusiveness and control over iOS app ecosystem. I don't think sueing them will get them anywhere but it might be a push to get them understand that users are aware of th…

From ordinary users, nobody cares about the web platform on mobile. Native apps are faster, with better integration to platform APIs and features, lighter on battery, and consistent (even if a large part of an app is just a webview in a native app shell). And for developers, they can actually be monetized and attract paying users, unlike mobile browser-based apps. Safari on mobile is pretty up to date as mobile techn…

> Safari on mobile is pretty up to date as mobile technologies come.

Quite the contrary. The number of bugs (which in many cases are many years old) and non standard behaviours on Safari for iOS is astounding.

For example not being able to set the height on an tag.

Re: Why we are suing Apple for better HTML5 support in iOS

#218

Post by DerekL »

yoz-y wrote: post #87
themihai wrote: post #30

Some(Apple) may say that the web/browser ecosystem is mess and it's not worth the investment though. However the restrictions on 3rd party browsers is weird. The application is sandboxed (thus no additional security threats compared to other apps) so I think the argument is political not technical.

The application is sandboxed but Apple does not really want to let third parties to put native compilers on their platform. I wonder if they could allow third party rendering engines but still force people to use Nitro (or how is their javascript engine called nowadays).

I think this is possible right now. The restriction in the license agreement only applies to executing code, not HTML rendering or network transfers. Since iOS 8 (I think), you can use JavaScriptCore separately from WebKit. So it should be possible to ship a browser app that uses its own renderer, as long as you replace the JavaScript engine with Apple's, but I don't know if that's worth the bother. Also, it will also run slower, because only the Safari app is permitted to do JIT compilation.

Re: Why we are suing Apple for better HTML5 support in iOS

#219

Post by pier25 »

coldtea wrote: post #184
amelius wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From ordinary users, nobody cares about the web platform on mobile. Native apps are faster Well, that's a problem right there. Instead of helping the web forward, Apple is keeping the web and web-apps second-class citizens. And of course this helps their own app platform and app store to be successful, and as a bonus it keeps developers within the walls of their garden.

> Well, that's a problem right there. Instead of helping the web forward, Apple is keeping the web and web-apps second-class citizens. The are de-facto second class citizens. The are apps that run on a second platform (the browser). If someone wants first-class support, build for the OS. Apple already spends tons of money to make an OS and a dev SDK for it.

> Apple already spends tons of money to make an OS and a dev SDK for it.

Developers have to spend tons of money in building and maintaining cross platform apps written in any way: native, hybrid, or with a VM like NativeScript does.

In the real world budgets are limited and going native isn't always an option. Apple acts as if native was the only viable option, and as if we only had to develop apps for iOS.

Re: Why we are suing Apple for better HTML5 support in iOS

#220

Post by pier25 »

st3fan wrote: post #168
bdhess wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Safari on mobile is pretty up to date as mobile technologies come. Google Chrome is hardly any better: http://mobilehtml5.org/ Safari on iOS is missing ten checkboxes in your link; Chrome on Android is missing two.

This also shows how much checkboxes mean: the last version tested there is Mobile Safari 9. We are currently at 10, which has a huge number of improvements in the area of JavaScript and HTML5 standards.

Web views are way behind Safari.
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