Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

pwa.gripe

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 343 posts

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#251

Post by [deleted] »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #215
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

It came out in the Epic trial that 90% of App Store revenue comes from loot boxes and other pay to win game mechanics - cry my a river for those companies. The other companies that are making money from mobile are usually front end for services that don’t monetize directly through in app purchases or give you the option of not paying through the App Store. The first million in revenue is 15% not 30% But also if it is…

[deleted]

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#252

Post by rejhgadellaa »

troupo wrote: post #190
rejhgadellaa wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 we…

> 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. So, instead of hiring a team to build an amazing PWA for Android, and an app for iOS, business hires three teams? One building a web app, a native app for iOS, and a native app for Android? > Compare that with desktop, where web apps (maybe not PWAs,…

> business hires three teams?

Yes. The web's winning feature is "it works everywhere". If your app doesn't work for the wealthiest 50% of users, why go that route? Making a desktop web app work on mobile, just for Android, is a lot of work. It needs to work on both iOS and Android to make it worthwhile.

> they all depend on full desktop browser to work (often due to sheer fact that they are complex apps that don't work well on mobile screens)

Gmail, Office, Docs - they all exist on mobile (as native apps). So it's not the complexity itself that makes it a problem on mobile screens. What does the native Gmail app do that the desktop web app doesn't?

> Android's market share is 68-70% worldwide.

Not in the wealthiest parts of the world, where the money is.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#253

Post by archerx »

rejhgadellaa wrote: post #153
mort96 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument which has been provided so far about why Safari is crippled is that it does not implement non-standard Chromium-only features. There are other problems with Safari, but they are not found in the page we are discussing.

I compiled a "short" list of why amd how Safari is crippled. Not entirely on topic for the post, but seems appropriate as a reply on this particular comment ;) https://webventures.rejh.nl/blog/2024/history-of-safari-show...

This is excellent!

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#254

Post by rejhgadellaa »

otterley wrote: post #198
rejhgadellaa wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought this was obvious, but higher costs for building and maintaining an app (vs a web app) means higher prices for users. I think people would love to pay less, and would hate to pay more.

How much is the incremental cost per user?

Building the same app for iOS, Android and desktop: up to 2-5 times the costs (for businesses, how they cover those costs depends)

App tax: 15-30%, which can drive the price for consumers up by up to 44%

https://open-web-advocacy.org/walled-gardens-report/#negativ...

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#255

Post by leptons »

mort96 wrote: post #226
leptons wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I pointed out that they don't help the open web, they stifle innovation of the web by abusing their power for profit. Which I think is far worse than anything you think Google is trying to do. I'm not giving Google a free pass here, sure they can be abusive, I hated "AMP" and I'm glad it got thrown on the junk pile. That was clearly abusive. But implementing Web Bluetooth? Not abusive, it's progress. And it's too…

I can't say anything other than "I disagree"; I think it does help the open web. You already admitted that you in your day job has been forced to make your site work in non-Chromium browsers thanks to Apple's authoritarian stance. That's a purely good outcome in my book, as much as I dislike the lack of user freedom that's behind it.

>You already admitted that you in your day job has been forced to make your site work in non-Chromium browsers thanks to Apple's authoritarian stance.

I did not say that at all. I'm not supporting iOS at all for the features that Apple won't implement in Safari. Tough titties Apple users. And why should I? iOS and MacOS world-wide are a small percentage of all users. And Apple doesn't care what their users don't get to access, so long as Apple is making money.

Apple is not the good guy here.

They are actually doing the opposite of you want, not sure how you can't see that. "The web" is now essentially all Apple will allow it to be, for their own greedy reasons.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#256

Post by [deleted] »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #219
_aavaa_ wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let Google dominate the web. If that’s a problem we can sort that out. But two wrongs don’t make a right.

As the ball of mud that is web standards grows, the less likely that it becomes that things can “sort themselves out”. Even as things are you need a literal army of developers to build and maintain a modern standards compliant browser, making any real threat to Chromium dominance unlikely, and that only intensifies as Google rolls ever more crap into the katamari. If users can then be harassed into switching to Chrom…

[deleted]

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#257

Post by leptons »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #227
leptons wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have no idea what my web application is, or whether it is shitty or not. So thanks for the troll - it reminds of my days on reddit, but now this pointless internet interaction is over .

A web app has never in history been as performant as a native app.

Not everything needs to be at the highest high of "performant", and you're ridiculous to use that as a gotcha.

I told you, this pointless internet interaction is over. You are not here to argue in good faith, so take it somewhere else.

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#258

Post by rejhgadellaa »

troupo wrote: post #192
rejhgadellaa wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, features can be a standard without (full) FF and/or Safari support. Second, Safari has a monopoly on iOS and controls what other browsers can support on the platform (that also usually means "less than Safari", because SF gets to support things first). They are in a unique position to hold back the entire web, even on other platforms. They're holding the standards hostage by not allowing the market to d…

> First of all, features can be a standard without (full) FF and/or Safari support. No. No they can't. A feature that is shipped in a single browser is just that: that browser's non-interoperable feature. We literally lived through this with Internet Explorer. The only reason the web is thriving now is because browser vendors agreed not to push this shit any longer. Well, until Google decided that whatever it does is…

> A feature that is shipped in a single browser is just that: that browser's non-interoperable feature.

AFAIK, the popover and/or anchor positioning APIs was standards before it shipped in more than one browser. (I will say that all three(?) of them agreed to build it)

> "it's a napkin scribble, not on any standards track".

Chromium/Blink have a process, and it's quite rigorous (precisely because they understand that they're pushing things, so they have a responsibility to make sure it's good):

https://www.chromium.org/blink/launching-features/

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#259

Post by pjmlp »

xd1936 wrote: post #207
pjmlp wrote: post #21

The advocates of ChromeOS Platform keep pushing their agenda. Chrome APIs and Electron crap, and then everyone complains about Microsoft.

Author here. I have no affiliation with Chrome, and use Zen and Firefox Mobile pretty much exclusively. I recently made an ESP32 hardware side project that I can configure entirely in the web browser via Web Bluetooth, got hyped, then immediately sad that my page was never going to work on iOS / iPad OS. So I threw together this webpage from caniuse.com data.

Firefox doesn't do Web Bluetooth.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=674737

Re: Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari

#260

Post by troupo »

rejhgadellaa wrote: post #252
troupo wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. So, instead of hiring a team to build an amazing PWA for Android, and an app for iOS, business hires three teams? One building a web app, a native app for iOS, and a native app for Android? > Compare that with desktop, where web apps (maybe not PWAs,…

> business hires three teams? Yes. The web's winning feature is "it works everywhere". If your app doesn't work for the wealthiest 50% of users, why go that route? Making a desktop web app work on mobile, just for Android, is a lot of work. It needs to work on both iOS and Android to make it worthwhile. > they all depend on full desktop browser to work (often due to sheer fact that they are complex apps that don't wo…

> Yes.

> If your app doesn't work for the wealthiest 50% of users, why go that route?

Why doesn't business hire two teams? One for the amazing native-like PWA, and one for iOS?

> Making a desktop web app work on mobile, just for Android, is a lot of work.

More work than hiring a separate Android team? More work than hiring a team to create a PWA which we've heard continuously for the past 10 years is amazingly easy and native-like?

> Gmail, Office, Docs - they all exist on mobile (as native apps). S

Yes, yes they do. As native apps

> Not in the wealthiest parts of the world, where the money is.

In 10 years you'd think we'd see actual examples of these amazing fast native-like PWAs on Android. All we hear is excuses.

Funnily enough I know of a few. E.g. Foodora's web app is surprisingly good, and it's possible that their "native" app is just running inside a webview, since it's indistibguishable from their website. But even MORE funnily enough, it takes a PWA sceptic to spot good PWA apps when none of the PWA proponents can point to a good PWA to save their life.

Post reply on HN