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iOS allows alternative browser engines in Japan

developer.apple.com

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Re: iOS allows alternative browser engines in Japan

#141

Post by chuckadams »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #111
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the conspiratorial version. The more likely explanation is that when every app can bundle their own browser engine, we will not see a competition explosion. Instead, Electron apps will come to mobile, with every app shipping its own browser stack. You can’t tell me Gecko, which has already failed on desktop, will suddenly be popular on mobile. You can easily tell me every app shipping their own Chromium would…

Every app shipping its own Chromium isn't currently forbidden, as I understand it. They're just not allowed to use their own engines for webviews.

Technically you can even write your own webview, but you can't make it the default, nor will it be able to JIT-compile JS, since that requires an entitlement that Apple never grants. Having no JIT is murder on both performance and battery life.

Re: iOS allows alternative browser engines in Japan

#142

Post by jjmarr »

creato wrote: post #25
hu3 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Documentation to guide devs on safe usage of C++ is enough? So any language should be allowed as long as they instruct developers to be careful.

I don't know if they do this, but those conventions could be enforced by a tool.

My work bans raw new and delete, so we only use unique_ptr. It's not as memory safe as Rust's borrow checker but I've never seen a segfault.

Re: iOS allows alternative browser engines in Japan

#144

Post by theplatman »

valleyer wrote: post #129
overfeed wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's only a matter of time until it becomes too confusing and problematic to try and run the same system relatively openly in one country and walled in another They will continue to do so for as long as it remains profitable. Navigating the complexities of multiple jurisdictions is the bread and butter of MNCs - it's the price of admission into the multinational club. Apple is guaranteed to have lawyers, admins, an…

Lawyers, admins, and executives, sure. But what about the complexity on the engineers who now have to maintain an exploding matrix of modes? I can definitely see that becoming burdensome.

Engineers say they want to work on hard problems then complain that they can’t solve something because it’s too complex

Re: iOS allows alternative browser engines in Japan

#145

Post by abacadaba »

valleyer wrote: post #129
overfeed wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's only a matter of time until it becomes too confusing and problematic to try and run the same system relatively openly in one country and walled in another They will continue to do so for as long as it remains profitable. Navigating the complexities of multiple jurisdictions is the bread and butter of MNCs - it's the price of admission into the multinational club. Apple is guaranteed to have lawyers, admins, an…

Lawyers, admins, and executives, sure. But what about the complexity on the engineers who now have to maintain an exploding matrix of modes? I can definitely see that becoming burdensome.

sounds like a problem for claude to worry about

Re: iOS allows alternative browser engines in Japan

#146

Post by MrMetric »

theplatman wrote: post #144
valleyer wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lawyers, admins, and executives, sure. But what about the complexity on the engineers who now have to maintain an exploding matrix of modes? I can definitely see that becoming burdensome.

Engineers say they want to work on hard problems then complain that they can’t solve something because it’s too complex

The difference is this isn't an inherently hard problem. It's just stupidity. The difficulty is not inherently interesting, because it's all made up.

Re: iOS allows alternative browser engines in Japan

#147

Post by rorylawless »

viktorcode wrote: post #99
rorylawless wrote: post #33

My hope for laws such as the ones Japan and the EU enacted was that companies would see the writing on the wall and change their practices worldwide, if only for cost reasons (it presumably being more expensive to maintain multiple sets of rules.) However, these companies are now so large that they can choose to absorb any inefficiencies on a country-by-country basis.

And what's your opinion if the law would oblige the companies to remove features their products have like tracking transparency popups? Two countries' courts already fined Apple for enforcing a popup that warns users about tracking across third party apps (a feature Apple themselves do not use)?

My prior POV was that Apple would jettison the feature globally, but the discussion elsewhere in this thread suggests that salami slicing at the software-level is a cost larger companies are willing to bear.

Re: iOS allows alternative browser engines in Japan

#148

Post by davnicwil »

valleyer wrote: post #129
overfeed wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's only a matter of time until it becomes too confusing and problematic to try and run the same system relatively openly in one country and walled in another They will continue to do so for as long as it remains profitable. Navigating the complexities of multiple jurisdictions is the bread and butter of MNCs - it's the price of admission into the multinational club. Apple is guaranteed to have lawyers, admins, an…

Lawyers, admins, and executives, sure. But what about the complexity on the engineers who now have to maintain an exploding matrix of modes? I can definitely see that becoming burdensome.

much has been written about the deteriorating quality of iOS.

There's bluntly not strong external evidence that software quality is a driving priority at Apple in recent years, so it most probably follows that concerns about maintainability aren't either.

Re: iOS allows alternative browser engines in Japan

#149

Post by mod50ack »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #127
ryandrake wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, unfortunately with software, using enough granular feature flags, they can make their software "maximally bad" for each given region. They lose a battle in the EU and are forced to make the software better? They will make it better only in the EU. Lose another one in Japan over a different issue? Just make a "japan" flag and only make it narrowly better for that use case in that region. Lose further battles in o…

Even in a hardware level, this is easily obtainable, and Apple already does it. Chinese iPhones? They have 2 physical SIM card slots and no eSIM. EU iPhones? 1 SIM card slot, and 1 eSIM. US iPhones? 2 eSIM card slots and no physical SIM. US iPhones also have mmWave when other countries do not. If Apple wanted to, keeping a Lightning US iPhone was easily on the cards. The EU’s role in forcing the issue in the US is ex…

There are different levels to these things. The number of SIM card slots or bands varying from model to model isn't that unusual. The average user just needs it to work. In fact, the SIM and band configuration differences have nothing to do with regional legal mimina — they have more to do with the standard practice and available systems in each region (for example, mmWave isn't widely deployed outside the US). The configurations aren't really "worse" in the same way as locking down browser access is worse. Phones have had regional variants going back ~forever for pretty mundane and benign reasons.

More importantly, if a user travels from one region to another, as long as they can use their phone in the place they arrive, having slightly non-optimal bands or a different SIM configuration doesn't matter. The fact that your phone is slightly different from the local model is not really a problem.

But having your charger vary across regions? That's a recipe for disaster. Not only is that another level of variance in your external casing, it impacts day-to-day use. When an American user travels to, say, France, or vice versa, and wants to buy a charger, or share one with someone else, having the same model of iPhone be incompatible would be a major frustration. It would be stupid to engineer a lightning AND USB-C version of the same device for each market.

Re: iOS allows alternative browser engines in Japan

#150

Post by bsimpson »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #127
ryandrake wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, unfortunately with software, using enough granular feature flags, they can make their software "maximally bad" for each given region. They lose a battle in the EU and are forced to make the software better? They will make it better only in the EU. Lose another one in Japan over a different issue? Just make a "japan" flag and only make it narrowly better for that use case in that region. Lose further battles in o…

Even in a hardware level, this is easily obtainable, and Apple already does it. Chinese iPhones? They have 2 physical SIM card slots and no eSIM. EU iPhones? 1 SIM card slot, and 1 eSIM. US iPhones? 2 eSIM card slots and no physical SIM. US iPhones also have mmWave when other countries do not. If Apple wanted to, keeping a Lightning US iPhone was easily on the cards. The EU’s role in forcing the issue in the US is ex…

My dad got his phone stolen on day 1 of a monthlong trip. He went without a phone the whole trip, in part because he was nervous he wouldn't have the right radios if he brought a euro phone home.
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