I can see why they're concerned that they can't update the app, but they're playing in a walled garden and they knew that from the get-go.

I think this is a pretty weak complaint and it lacks any real substance.

That's the thing I miss most about Microsoft's dominance though : no walled garden.

Now apple has a heavy handed walled garden, and Google has a heavy-handed one (chrome/chromeos) and a "light" one, in android. All ... well, suck.

If Microsoft thought they could get away with a walled garden then they would do it in a flash.

They're trying that with Windows 10 S.

Sort of.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/application-managem...

So it's similar to Google's Android, although with the caveat that it's much easier for companies to have sideloaded company apps.

I think your first example is somewhat disingenuous.

The vast majority of people will never change their default settings on the vast majority of things. The ability to change something does not contradict the view that a company is engaging in that behavior, and persisting it, for money. E.g. Mozilla/Firefox recently swapping to Google as their default browser would be the same thing, even if they know it's likely somewhat antithetical to many of their users - they will profit from those who are too lazy, or too ill informed, to change it.

I get what you're saying, but your point is also self-defeating for your argument. I would posit that someone who goes out of their way to install Puffin for its benefits would also be aware enough of the ability to change search providers. I have difficulty envisioning the user interested enough to research alternative browsers that are not Safari/Chrome/Firefox who also is not aware of changing default search settings.

It's not just those that would be aware of changing default search settings, but those that actually would. So we have a Venn Diagram of users that would be willing to try out something marketed as "a wicked fast mobile browser" and those that would go out of their way to change Google as the default search engine. What's the exact intersection there? I think we're both left to just wildly speculate, but I do think we can agree it wouldn't be even remotely close to 100%.

Quite sincerely, they should just look into running WebKit server-side.

That said, in my experience if Apple has secretly decided they don't like you, they tend to move the goalposts on you in subsequent reviews, so migrating their systems to WebKit may not be time well spent.

Server-side??? Apple requires apps use the Apple WebKit framework only for web content, which runs only on the client-side. The point of Puffin is to run Flash and other desktop crapware websites that don’t work on Mobile Safari (Apple WebKit) properly.

Puffin isn’t a native or local web browser; it’s an optimized, virtual, remote browser viewer. If they sell it as a “Citrix for the web,” they might have a shot.

Ah, I didn't realise that was Puffin's use case.

Opera Mini does the same thing as Puffin. Puffin wasn't denied access because it rendered on a server.