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Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

pwa.gripe

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Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#41

Post by nickalekhine »

dgxyz wrote: post #3

Yeah sorry but as an end user I’d rather have an actual app than some PWA thanks. Keep going Apple.

Better PWA support gives users (and developers) more optionality with app distribution. Apple building out these APIs would not take away from their native apps.

The UX of visiting a site and with a single click of a button having an app on my home screen sounds great. I'd also like to have the option of side loading a native app too. And if those options sound unappealing, you can keep using the App Store if you want the assurance of using an 'officially approved' app.

A lot of very prominent apps are written using web technologies anyways. Take a look at the continued popularity of React Native (and Flutter as well).

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#42

Post by jjmint »

I would gladly give up all those “features” to use Safari over Chrome on Android. I don’t even know what kind of dumbass on Hacker News voluntarily raw dogs the internet on Chrome Android. Pathetic that Safari has had extension support for multiple years now while Chrome is still ass.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#43

Post by politelemon »

I argue that developers enable the egregious behaviour by supporting safari in the first place. Just as IE was called out and shunned for its shenanigans, before they started behaving better, so too does safari need to be treated. However, it does also feel too late, they have crippled other browsers too with their platform abuse masquerading as requirements while we celebrated it.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#45

Post by CamJN »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #23
CamJN wrote: post #5

Absolutely nothing listed on that site as unsupported by Safari has any business being part of the web. In fact several supported APIs should be chucked too. Fuck giving websites motion data or push notifications.

They should just ban unsolicited prompts. That's it. Push notifications are the #1 featured requests of my online community. Some even switched to Android over it. And people don't understand adding sites to their homescreen, especially since Apple buried that feature in the Share menu. No Android user of my website ever complained about the WebPush notifications.

I don’t care what your website does, not one tiny bit. I care that the majority of websites are shit, and therefore the web platform should be as minimal and isoltated from the device as possible.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#46

Post by internet2000 »

hx8 wrote: post #2

I'm writing this in Safari now, I'm a huge fan. There are several "features" that I actively dislike and disable in other browsers. I wonder if not being implemented in mobile safari is preventing them from being required in some webpages. * Vibration * Background Sync * Bluetooth * NFC * Notifications * Web Push

Agree and I’d add WebUSB and WebMIDI. Want to interface with USB? Go through the OS.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#47

Post by joezydeco »

matthewfcarlson wrote: post #29

Like most people (at least on this thread). I’m okay with the vast majority of these things not supported in mobile safari. But man, Bluetooth would be nice. I often provision esp32 devices for various things and either I need an app or a laptop when my phone is perfectly capable.

Yeah it's killing me too. I make a product that's MFI certified and I still can't use a browser to talk to it.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#48

Post by OptionOfT »

tugten wrote: post #38
agust wrote: post #25

Worth noting that Apple doesn't just cripple iOS Safari, it cripples all iOS browsers because it also forces them to use WebKit, the crippled browser engine underneath Safari. It would be fine if they just made Safari bad, that's their choice. But they don't stop there: they make the entire web bad on iOS purposely to promote the native apps they can tax.

Firefox was planning a native gecko based ios app. But Apple decided to limit it to EU forcing developers to choose to maintain seperate projects for a limited users.

The Brussels Effect takes care of a lot of hardware changes for the better, for the world (think USB-C).

But for software, not so much.

Examples:

* Windows N (no media player stuff) and KN (no media player stuff, no messenger)

* Windows installed in the EEA (ability to disable / change start menu search with Bing, ability to remove Edge, ability to add widget providers)

* iOS with only allowing 3rd party app stores and 3rd party browser engines in the EEA.

* Google only allowing certain things when the phone is in the USA.

And it's gonna get worse with age verification. All of the sudden the manufacturers have even more data.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#50

Post by gardnr »

hk1337 wrote: post #28

How many of these features that chrome offers have been fully flushed out and in a true working stable state? Google Chrome has a habit of pushing features out before they're really ready and Safari is usually on par with Firefox for features from what I have seen.

It's not a question of readiness or capability. It's an MBA with a spreadsheet explaining to a room full of people how much money Apple will lose if they allow X feature to work in Safari. This is user-negative behavior from a company that has so much money the best thing they can think of to do with it is to bank it offshore in a tax haven.
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