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Home Screen Advantage

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Re: Home Screen Advantage

#71

Post by the_gipsy »

JimDabell wrote: post #62
the_gipsy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not easy, you need a multithousand dollar apple machine, and you can't share this app with anybody else.

No, you don’t. You need a Mac, but you don’t need to buy one. You can use a free tier on a build service like Bitrise if you don’t have a Mac.

Perhaps technically possible, but in practice it's against apple development directives. I doubt you do this yourself, or know anyone that actually develops iOS apps from a non-mac in the real world.

And you still can't share that app.

Re: Home Screen Advantage

#72

Post by JimDabell »

xandrius wrote: post #67
JimDabell wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you don’t. You need a Mac, but you don’t need to buy one. You can use a free tier on a build service like Bitrise if you don’t have a Mac.

But don't you see how it is yet another hurdle? Android builds work on that same mac too.

I didn’t say it wasn’t a hurdle, I said you don’t need a “multi thousand dollar Apple machine”. And the cheapest Macs cost way less than that anyway.

Re: Home Screen Advantage

#73

Post by [deleted] »

underwater wrote: post #59
th4tg41 wrote: post #2

Off topic: This site is next to unreadable on my phone. Zigzagscrolling is an insult to the audience.

If Safari supported extensions then you'd have the ability to resolve this by installing something like Readability. If iOS supported other browsers then you could read it in a Chromium based browser, where it appears completely readable.

[deleted]

Re: Home Screen Advantage

#74

Post by npteljes »

gambiting wrote: post #26
verisimi wrote: post #5

PWA - progressive web app, delivered via the web, html, CSS, JavaScript, etc.

Thank you! I hate when articles use acronyms and never actually expand what they mean - I read the entire article without any clue what PWAs actually are.

I agree, it's a bad writing practice. And it's very simple to be completely unambiguous - just use the complete phrase the first time. So in this case, the tagline could just be "Decoding Apple's Desperate Ploy To Scuttle Progressive Web Applications", and then, if people see PWA, they can decipher it themselves.

But of course this seems to be a personal blog, so much of it is up to personal taste, as it should be.

Re: Home Screen Advantage

#75

Post by JimDabell »

the_gipsy wrote: post #71
JimDabell wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you don’t. You need a Mac, but you don’t need to buy one. You can use a free tier on a build service like Bitrise if you don’t have a Mac.

Perhaps technically possible, but in practice it's against apple development directives. I doubt you do this yourself, or know anyone that actually develops iOS apps from a non-mac in the real world. And you still can't share that app.

> in practice it's against apple development directives.

Most professional iOS developers use these kinds of services. They are totally commonplace and not against Apple’s terms in the slightest.

Re: Home Screen Advantage

#76

Post by Xelbair »

pantulis wrote: post #25
phartenfeller wrote: post #18

I think removing persistent storage and the ability to add websites to the home screen makes it obvious what their strategy is. The EU shows that they want interoperability for big players like they do with messenger interoperability in the DMA. The web is such a fundamental standard and its interoperability is so important I guess the EU will fine Apple for such behavior. The question is how soon this will happen.

> I guess the EU will fine Apple for such behavior. The question is how soon this will happen Too late, I'm afraid. Apple has pulled a really smart trick against the tons of paper written by EU commissioners.

I think you aren't aware that EU courts judge on intent, not letter of the law.

Re: Home Screen Advantage

#77

Post by kilburn »

aragilar wrote: post #55
beardyw wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web apps are mostly optional and otherwise work as a normal web site. Differences are that some functions are exclusive to web apps, so you wouldn't get them on a web site anyway. A feature I do find annoying is the ability to save a page onto my (Android) phone screen is taken away and replaced by "install app". I work around that by going into airplane mode, fetching the page unsuccessfully, and saving that!

That doesn't mean they don't have ads, or other things I want to work around.

The point is that with EU mandating alt-browsers on iOS, it should have been a possibility to have "Installed" (home-)PWAs where the engine is the alt-browser, not safari/webview.

Those browsers could have implemented the Home-PWA functionality while maintaining your ability to install plugins such as adblockers within that PWA's context.

Apple has made this impossible by removing the OS APIs that allowed "Installed" (home-)PWAs entirely. This is just so they aren't forced to allow these under a different browser engine.

Of course, this is all done because "think of the children" (i.e.: think of the poor people ticked into using a non-privacy-respecting browser to run their PWAs).

Re: Home Screen Advantage

#78

Post by JimDabell »

the_gipsy wrote: post #53
Karellen wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, the issue is, who do I distrust less - Google or Apple? Yes, they're both shitty in a number of ways. And while is is easier to root Android devices than it is to root iOS ones, last I checked you were still dependent on the vendor kernel and parts of the vendor display server on Android because not all of the necessary drivers and related config are upstreamed (and the lack of TIVO clauses in GPLv2 makes thi…

Apple's no longer a hardware company, they're a platform rent extraction company. They are directly misleading and harming their users with this move, and also with the existing dark patterns around iCloud storage.

> Apple's no longer a hardware company, they're a platform rent extraction company.

Apple still make the vast majority of their revenue from hardware. All of their service revenue combined is only about 20% of their revenue.

Re: Home Screen Advantage

#79

Post by sebstefan »

aragilar wrote: post #24

Not an IPhone user: but honesty I'd rather have things open an actual browser tab, as then I can interact with it via all my standard extensions (e.g. adblockers), rather than be opened in a webview. Also, given how often you need to change phones (given build quality), if I have important data and you're a web app, I rather the server be the source of truth, and the phone a cache (so I don't loose data when the phon…

With Firefox Mobile on Android, you can confiure webviews to open as Firefox webviews as well, and my extensions seem to be running because I don't see ads there. They're still webviews of course, you don't get the tabs, bookmarks etc. Just webviews with extension support.

Re: Home Screen Advantage

#80

Post by zimpenfish »

underwater wrote: post #59
th4tg41 wrote: post #2

Off topic: This site is next to unreadable on my phone. Zigzagscrolling is an insult to the audience.

If Safari supported extensions then you'd have the ability to resolve this by installing something like Readability. If iOS supported other browsers then you could read it in a Chromium based browser, where it appears completely readable.

> If Safari supported extensions

iOS Safari does support extensions. I've got a handful installed on my phone right now, including Userscripts to apply custom formatting and styling to this website.

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