Yes I want more shitty web apps. Also you can’t imagine how much I love cross platform Electron apps. I have no desire for random websites to have that much access to my phone.
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Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari
131–140 of 343 posts
Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari
#132I feel like the vast majority of these are features of an operating system? Not a web browser?
Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari
#133The irony of this webpage being terribly optimized for mobile clients…
Nested scrollbars! Horizontal and vertical scroll!
Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.…
> 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). Why don’t you encourage them to get an Android? What makes you think that people who prefer an iOS device over Android would even install Chrome after you nag them with dark patterns? > I also do not plan to sell anything through my webapp, which is why Apple wan…
> What makes you think that people who prefer an iOS device over Android would even install Firefox
100% guaranteed people would. I know this for a fact. You somehow have proof of the negative for some reason. Maybe you can share that.
Regardless, just because you are satisfied with iOS as a platform doesn't mean others don't continue to wish for improvements.
Can I ask which version of iOS was perfect in our mind?
Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari
#135For 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?
If a web app doesn't work on iOS, a business builds a native app instead. iOS is too important. So that fantastic native-like PWA never gets built in the first place.
Apple is not just holding back PWA on iOS, they're holding back the entire web everywhere.
Compare that with desktop, where web apps (maybe not PWAs, strictly speaking) are dominating: Gmail, Office/Docs, GitHub, Figma, you basically do everything in web apps.
And if you count Electron [1]: VSCode, Slack, Spotify, etc, etc.
[1] Importantly, Electron lets you bring your own (browser) engine. You can build a native app on iOS that is just a wrapper around a web app, but it has to run on iOS' WebKit, and is thus limited by what Apple deems worthy
Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari
#136It would be useful if the site listed whether these had been standardized outside of Chrome yet. It’s hard to delineate which of these are Chrome features or actual web standards. And it’s therefore hard to blame either Safari or Firefox for not supporting them if they’re not standardized yet.
>It’s hard to delineate which of these are Chrome features or actual web standards. And it’s therefore hard to blame either Safari or Firefox for not supporting them if they’re not standardized yet. Maybe you don't realize that Apple is on the W3C board that gets to decide which APIs become standards, so they can squash any API that they think could cut into their app store. Citing Firefox as some kind of evidence do…
You’ve said this above and have been corrected that Apple cannot single handedly veto proposals.
Given the rest of your argument hinges on a misunderstanding of the process I’m not sure it holds much merit.
Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari
#137I want location permissions for web apps installed to the home screen to be separate from Safari.
I want to auto-deny websites asking me for location permissions. But I want to be able to grant location permissions to installed web apps on a case-by-case basis just like with regular apps.
Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari
#138I recently posted about how I refuse to buy apple products because of stuff like this. The lock in has made iPhone users dependent on a app ecosystem when we could have had most of our functionality through the open web. People saying they don't want these features are missing the point. Its about control and if developers have the option to make something as a website that actually works that gives them less incenti…
Break the app store monopoly, don’t make the web browser into a buggy leaky bloated mess. And you can write iOS apps in objective c, swift, kotlin, jacascript, rust, ruby, and a few dozen other languages.
The web can be a competitor for the app stores, breaking that monopoly. It already did on desktop (where most users spend > 90% of their time in a browser)
And yes, you can write native apps in a lot of languages, but you can't choose how/where you distribute.
On the web, you can. It's built that way.
Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wan…
> 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). And it shows through their laggy interfaces and non-native UI/UX. The people don't like apps built with web tech; developers and LLMs like them because they're a shortcut.
> The people don't like apps built with web tech
Then why do most people spend > 90% of their time in a browser (or web-powered app) on desktop?
Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari
#140It'd be nice if desktop safari was a column.