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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

#101

Post by JimDabell »

nozzlegear wrote: post #54
spiderfarmer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. "Add to homescreen" is in the "Share" menu. That's where they burry all bodies.

Isn't that where it's been for ages?

It’s been there since literally iPhoneOS 1.0. They are calling it “share” now, but really it’s always meant “put / send this somewhere”. The difference with recent versions of iOS is that the share button is no longer always visible but you need to press the ellipses button to reveal it. It’s there along with all the other dastardly actions Apple doesn’t want you to know about, such as “Add to Favourites”.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#102

Post by troupo »

rejhgadellaa wrote: post #86
chuckadams wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The third column is your current browser and platform, and for me it's showing Firefox on macOS missing a lot of features. When I switch over to Brave, I see Chrome on macOS. Interestingly, Chrome on macOS apparently supports vibration, despite the hardware for it being nonexistent.

But on macOS you can switch to a browser that can do all these things. A company could ask you to use a different browser (not ideal, but if the web app requires a specific API, it's not an unreasonable). Safari is in a very special position because it controls what the web can do on iOS (all browsers on iOS have to use Apple's WebKit engine, they can't add web features). Apple is not just gatekeeping native (through…

> the open webm

Sonehow you seem to confuse open web with Chrome-only non-standard APIs

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#103

Post by leptons »

mort96 wrote: post #81
pilif wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is not in a position where it is the only browser allowed to run on a platform. On iOS, you’re either doing a native app, sharing 30% of your income with Apple, or you’re restricted to Safari’s feature set. No browser in iOS can use anything but WebKit

Even so, conflating "Safari is holding the web platform back by not implementing standardized web features" with "Safari is holding the Google platform back by not implementing non-standard Google features" is kind of disingenuous. Going through some of the list from the top: * Shortcuts in the manifest: This seems to be standard. Would be nice if mobile Safari supported it. * Protocol Handling: This is non-standard.…

>Even so, conflating "Safari is holding the web platform back by not implementing standardized web features" with "Safari is holding the Google platform back by not implementing non-standard Google features" is kind of disingenuous.

You missed the point completely.

Apple >forbids any browser engine on iOS other than their own Safari. So you can't just install Chrome on iOS, because when you do you get Safari instead.

I would not care how Apple cripples their own web browser if they didn't force other browsers on iOS to use their browser engine. They are forcing me to write a native app instead of just tell my customers to install Chrome to have access to the APIs my product needs (web bluetooth).

I am not an iOS app developer, I'm a web developer. I don't have the resources to support that kind of code when I already have a perfectly working web app on the competing platform. I also do not plan to sell anything through my webapp, which is why Apple wants to force developers to create a native app, where they can collect 30% (or whatever % it is now) of anything sold through the app.

It doesn't matter what the standards are or aren't. Apple are just being greedy assholes and what they are doing is absolutely worse than what Microsoft did to get sued in an antitrust case when they simply bundled IE in Windows.

And to make it worse, Apple is on the board that decides what standards get into W3C, so they are blocking useful APIs based on their own greed.

This is part of the reason Apple is currently being sued by the DOJ

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#104

Post by burnerthrow008 »

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.

> Push notifications are the #1 featured requests of my online community. Some even switched to Android over it.

That sounds like the market working, no? Some people like how Apple does things, so they stick with Apple. Others prefer Android, so they switch.

The point is that users should have choice, not force users to bend to the will of malicious developers.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#105

Post by leptons »

kmeisthax wrote: post #91
nerdjon wrote: post #53

I am curious why Safari in particular is getting a lot of the hate here when firefox supports even less of the features which leads me to believe that the reason many of these features have not been accepted is because they have not been accepted by the larger ecosystem and is just google pushing their own things as standard (Feels like IE days in many ways). That being said, I am not sure why I would actually want m…

KNOW THE BROWSER RULES Firefox refusing to implement a web standard: APPROPRIATE Safari refusing to implement a web standard: INAPPROPRIATE

Which browser engine are you getting on iOS when you install Firefox?

If you answered Firefox, you are WRONG.

You get Safari, because Apple forces all browsers on iOS to use their own crippled browser engine.

Apple also is part of the W3C board that gets to decide which APIs get to become standards, so they also influence what other browser makers do.

This would be a non-issue if Apple didn't force all browsers on iOS to use their Safari engine.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#106

Post by troupo »

FormularSumo wrote: post #97

It's a cool page, although somewhat limited in scope. If you want a more complete picture of all the web progress Apple is holding back, not "just" PWA and more advanced capabilities, this is probably a better site for comparison: https://ios404.com It includes dates for when these things were first shipped, explanations for that they do, and what kind of standards (or not) they are.

Note how it doesn't list which of these are Chrome-only non-standard APIs that Firefox doesn't support either.

Oh wait. You don't care about small details like that. None of these Chrome shilling websites do.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#107

Post by troupo »

otterley wrote: post #82

For those of you who believe support for PWAs is critically important: in what way does it impact you? What kind of solution are you providing (or, put another way, what problem are you solving) for customers, and why would a PWA app be better than a native one for them ? (As opposed to, say, convenience for you .)

I keep asking: Android doesn't have all these perceived limitations. Where are all the amazing native-like PWAs on Android?

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#108

Post by rejhgadellaa »

strogonoff wrote: post #56

As far as I can see based on pwa.gripe data, between 26.3 (my version) and the newcoming 26.4 Safari on iOS gains support for five new APIs: — Offline support — Media capture — Picture-in-picture — Storage — Speech synthesis As well as five more APIs with caveats: — Installation — Notifications — Web Push — Barcode detection — Speech recognition Even taking into account that it also evidently loses support for one (a…

Do you have a source link for this? I don't want to sound snarky, but this list doesn't make sense to me.

Offline support has been available (and buggy, YMMV) for a long time.

Web Push has been available since 16.4 (with a lot of caveats)

I haven't heard anything about installation (but I may have missed something)

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#110

Post by dandiep »

For me, the biggest hurdle to writing a PWA is the insane installation process [1]. There are also a ton of quirks, eg I don’t think you can update the icon if it’s installed as a PWA. It is hard to argue that this whole process has not been hobbled intentionally.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/s/yVERKqoJgb

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