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Home Screen Advantage

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Re: Home Screen Advantage

#91

Post by Munksgaard »

JimDabell wrote: post #78
the_gipsy wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Out of curiosity, what is the margin on their service income vs. their hardware income?

Re: Home Screen Advantage

#92

Post by the_gipsy »

JimDabell wrote: post #75
the_gipsy wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel you're being disingenuous. Close to zero professional iOS developers develop on a non-mac.

Re: Home Screen Advantage

#93

Post by ephemeral-life »

JimDabell wrote: post #78
the_gipsy wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Revenue doesn't really matter, you should look at profits. Amazon makes most of their revenue from the website, but pretty much all of their profits come from cloud. The tech giant business model is to dominate distribution and extract profits by self preferencing. Im sure apple's services division is a good portion of their profits.

Re: Home Screen Advantage

#95

Post by nottorp »

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.

But why should you need extensions to go around some site disrespecting you?

Re: Home Screen Advantage

#96

Post by pantulis »

Xelbair wrote: post #76
pantulis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I did not mean to say that Apple will get away with this, it's just that I don't expect the EU to be exactly fast in its response. As the FA says, it will take its sweet time and by then Apple will have reinforced their dominant position. Of course Apple and their legal teams already know that.

Re: Home Screen Advantage

#97

Post by boomskats »

The number of apologists and distractors in this comments section honestly makes me feel like it's been brigaded. I'm amazed, given how well informed this crowd typically is.

As for the topic being discussed - Apple have gone out of their way for the last _decade_ to avoid implementing things like ServiceWorkers properly. I remember having this same conversation back in 2015. It is a real shame, as things like the proposed w3c sensors api would totally eliminate the pain of deploying private/internal/enterprise apps to a fleet of employees, for example. There is so much that this enables for private apps. I won't be surprised if their decade+ old viewport meta tag reference documentation for home screen icons and status bar styling in full screen mode stops working at some point too - it's been neglected for years. It'll be a weird, heartbreaking example of corporate revisionism, especially considering Steve Jobs' original vision for apps on the iphone.

I'm not a huge fan of the big G either, but I honestly hope they take advantage of this with some clever (non-developer) product-centric marketing. PWAs are a very well thought out approach to 90% of what modern apps are. We absolutely should be sandboxing private browser instances per PWA, not shipping entire separate webkit wrappers for every app every time an app is updated. It's almost literally the same difference as shipping layered container images as updates instead of giant VM blobs. Such a huge loss.

Re: Home Screen Advantage

#98

Post by fuzzy2 »

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…

I’d like to quickly address the second paragraph. From my experience, iPhones last until their software support runs out, barring any accidents. Furthermore, PWAs need not be offline applications (so TFA overblows the data loss potential ever so slightly) but often work exactly like you want them to.

I use the Outlook PWA. It’s great because I don’t have to let my company manage (part of) my phone.

Re: Home Screen Advantage

#99

Post by joemelonyeah »

coldtea wrote: post #56

Thank god for Apple's lacklustre support for PWAs. Else iOS would be like macOS, with every second app from a major vendor people need to run (for work, school, banking, etc) would be the equivalent of an Electron monstrocity. Apparently that's the dream of the author.

Funny that the reverse has already happened due to Apple's lackluster support of PWAs. PWAs run with the system's browser engine, unlike Electron apps that ship with their own customized Chromium engine. Each app is only a few megabytes tops, unlike the hundreds of megabytes of bloat native apps tend to take up nowadays.

Re: Home Screen Advantage

#100

Post by rambambram »

Although I agree with the article and the obvious sh!t move Apple is making, one needs to keep making a distinction between PWAs and web apps in general. Not every 'web app' needs local storage or push notifications.

Besides, I heard the 'simple' web apps still can have a place on the homescreen. Can anybody with an iPhone tell me if that works like the video from the article? Is it just with an address bar?

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