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Apple confirms it's breaking iPhone web apps in the EU on purpose

techcrunch.com

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Re: Apple confirms it's breaking iPhone web apps in the EU on purpose

#321

Post by leifross »

lannisterstark wrote: post #48
kryptiskt wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this isn't a parlor game, I have no idea why they think the antitrust pressure will abate by such bad faith nonsense moves. Next step for the EU is to make Tim Cook choose whether he wants to be CEO of the device side or service side of the broken up Apple. It's clear that fining them is useless.

Ah yeah man EU is totally gonna break up apple. Some of y'all need to be reminded to be realistic.

On the contrary, this tantrum by no means works to lessen the growing idea that control of the platform should be put into the hands of a independent third party.

While not European in origin, the platform holds and manages tremendous value for us, to the extent where small changes can cause mayor economic disruption, and Apple has not been managing it fairly.

And for a state actor, which exists to serve the common good, it is not acceptable that a single company holds and abuses this kind of power.

Re: Apple confirms it's breaking iPhone web apps in the EU on purpose

#322

Post by layer8 »

bhelkey wrote: post #282
dbtc wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's a good device to replace my iphone 13 mini?

I have enjoyed my Zenfone 10. It's a little Taiwanese phone that's a comparable size. Specifically, I like its battery life, its camera, and that it has a headphone jack.

The Zenfone 10 is almost the same size as the regular iPhone (a tad bit narrower, a tad bit thicker, same weight). The form factor is not like the iPhone mini.

Re: Apple confirms it's breaking iPhone web apps in the EU on purpose

#323

Post by c-cube »

aetherspawn wrote: post #205

I am on Apples side here. I have been a macOS and iPhone user for over a decade now, but have had Android devices and I use Windows for games and work. I think what the EU has done to Apple is unfair. It is unfortunate in my opinion that they can’t just tell them to get stuffed. They have had to build probably 100-million LOCs just so EU have the right to pick their own browser, and yet Safari works just fine. In fac…

> keep cost low

Have you seen the price of Apple devices?? They're anything but low. If Apple has to reduce a bit their margin because they lose their monopoly I won't be shedding tears for them.

Re: Apple confirms it's breaking iPhone web apps in the EU on purpose

#324

Post by jquery »

vundercind wrote: post #289
luuurker wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the benefit for you as a user to side with Apple on things like this?

I don't care about PWAs and would generally prefer companies not have the option so they can't try to push me into one. Anything that makes that less-viable is good for me. I wish Apple'd held a hard line on the "no apps that should be a web site" rule(s) for similar reasons. Alas, they did not.

I agree. My experience with PWAs is they are usually downgrade from a safari bookmark... they are created to benefit the provider, not the user, by taking away browser abilities from me (back, forward, copy url, etc).

Re: Apple confirms it's breaking iPhone web apps in the EU on purpose

#325

Post by sagarm »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #318
arghwhat wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really doesn't make sense. By that logic, I shouldn't be allowed to load web pages because it's impossible to secure a browser. PWA's only need a few extra integration privileges like badge- and window control, rest is just a web as usual. What you link is a case of one app (edge) reading the data of another app (chrome), which is entirely unrelated to PWAs.

> What you link is a case of one app (edge) reading the data of another app (chrome), which is entirely unrelated to PWAs. In one sense, sure. But in another sense Edge taking Chrome's tabs means Microsoft is getting insight into Google's data. A lot of Apple's defenses seem really targeted at reducing the ability of Microsoft, Google, and Meta to extract value from Apple's users. Apple sees the union of all the app…

After all, Apple users are the product. They even pay for the privilege!

Re: Apple confirms it's breaking iPhone web apps in the EU on purpose

#326

Post by flessner »

sreejithr wrote: post #305
johanneskanybal wrote: post #25

As a European dev I want apple to fail super hard and implode. They used to be so cool and make slick hardware for their nische but now I'm happy to use worse hardware as long as they disapear from the face of the earth.

Stop this bureaucracy in the EU and build something for a change. Shipping for EU is stupid hard. And you guys are declining in economy. Pretty soon, there won't be any economic arguments to continue doing business in EU with all the cost of this bureaucracy involved.

1) You can predict the future economic state of the EU as well as the next person

2) Most of the "bureaucracy" that hits small to medium sized companies is the GDPR, which any business with the slightest of integrity should have no problem to follow

Re: Apple confirms it's breaking iPhone web apps in the EU on purpose

#327

Post by jquery »

kemayo wrote: post #265
fock wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the bunch of new APIs might just be a containerized copy of the users browser? Seems very easy.

I think there's a lot of edge cases, and just spinning up an entire new data container for iOS Chrome and launching a web app inside it would probably make Chrome very confused . (It wouldn't know to hide its normal tab/browser UI, to not nag the user about logging into their google account, etc.) Like I said, Apple could totally make APIs so that Chrome could know it was being launched in a container with data isola…

Bookmarks are superior to PWAs, anything that reduces the spread of PWAs is a good thing in my opinion.

Re: Apple confirms it's breaking iPhone web apps in the EU on purpose

#328

Post by jsnell »

w4 wrote: post #185

I’m primed to be upset with Apple these days, but this doesn’t seem like an unreasonable position. The EU is forcing them to do a bunch of work to support alternate browser engines, this in turn creates a bunch of additional work if Apple wants to fully support PWAs, and PWAs aren’t really in Apple’s financial interest to begin with, so f-it. They're not going to spend resources to add support for PWAs in the EU. It'…

The EU is not forcing Apple to do any work. Apple is choosing to do the work mostly to make competing browsers as limited and non-compelling as possible, while still hoping to stay within the letter of the law. They could in reality comply pretty much by removing their arbitrary restrictions.

> It's a rational choice. Apple isn’t a charity, so why would they spend resources on extra work that they didn’t want to do in the first place, given that work is not required for legal compliance.

I mean, the obvious answer would be that it actually is required. And the outcome of that would be that Apple gets a bunch of bad press, pays a ton in fines, and ends up with a consent decree that restricts them more than just acting in good faith would have.

It feels like a really stupid gamble. There's so little to gain from it, in comparison to the cost if the gamble fails. Apple owns their users, lock, stock and barrel. Basically none of them is going to switch to a competing app store or browser even once those exist. And when the users don't move, neither will the developers.

Re: Apple confirms it's breaking iPhone web apps in the EU on purpose

#329

Post by trinsic2 »

M4v3R wrote: post #79
summerlight wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should we trust Apple for security in that context? Apple also provides all those functionalities via their proprietary API, which is not even audit-able. If Apple really believes in that argument, they should disable their own API as well.

You have to trust someone if you're using a computing device connected to the Internet. The point of being in Apple ecosystem is that you trust Apple, and then (supposedly) you can not trust anyone else. To many that's a very strong proposition.

I'd rather trust a public (not-for-profit) institution that actually had a real incentive to protect user security. Instead we get for-profit companies that have a vested interest (conflict of interest) to do security the way it thinks it should be done. In my experience, that usually is bad for the people that are using the platform because there is no real surety that security is being done for the sake of the users.

Apple has no interest in working with public institutions that have a close relationship with the people they serve. That's a big red flag in my book. You cant trust a company that serves content and hardware and at the same time trust them with security. It's too many eggs in one basket, to easy of a target for rogue entities (NSA) even if they have good motives .

Re: Apple confirms it's breaking iPhone web apps in the EU on purpose

#330

Post by rchaud »

Symbiote wrote: post #253
SigmundA wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Android allows alternative rendering engines besides Chrome for PWA? If you install Firefox it uses Gecko but still has native app look feel? I honestly don't know but would be surprised if they did.

Installing a PWA on Firefox for Android adds the icon to the homescreen with a tiny Firefox icon at the bottom. The look and feel is Android, there's no obvious bits that would look either Firefox or Chrome. https://web.dev/learn/pwa/tools-and-debug#using_physical_dev... at "Firefox Remote Debugging" says there's a way to debug Firefox for Android PWAs. So I'm fairly sure the PWA is running using Firefox for Android.…

The look and feel of the app itself is a CSS issue. There are web app frameworks that specifically offer themes matching style guides provided by Apple and Google. Framework7 is an example: the demo app on the home page is styled using iOS UI elements, and there is an option for more Android style designs as well.

https://framework7.io/

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