Access to NFC is a huge one. This has a ton of use-cases in for instance IoT and smart home, and Apple limiting access prevents a lot of innovation in that space which might compete with their offering.

Another example is Apple's privileged access to your wifi credentials. Basically this means if you want to share wifi access via your app, as you might want to do in setting up an IoT device, this is only possible if you enter Apple's expensive MFI program.

So in other words, to have a seamless and competitive IoT hardware setup process, you essentially have to enter an agreement with Apple which involves giving them a percentage of your overall hardware sales revenue on MFI devices.

Are IoT and Smart Home actually *that* huge?

It's a massive example of how Apple inserts themselves as a toll collector on an entire industry which they are largely unrelated to.

Let me pose it to you this way: if you are developing an IoT product, the only way to have a UX competitive with Apple's own offerings is to pay them a toll on every device you sell. In return, you get a couple dozen bytes of data Apple prevents other apps from accessing.

Does that sound like anti-trust regulation is operating as it should?

Bypassing if it is or not, how could we ever know how big it is if Apple is stopping anyone from even trying?

If you delete an Apple app and redownload it it will put itself on the homebar or first app page pushing your other apps away. Comman, they dont let other apps do that!

It was Apple Music and they have fixed that in the most recent update.

Thanks for being a voice of reason rather than assuming Apple Is Evil at every turn lol.

Doesn’t NFC work just fine for most third parties? I have various cards that all work for payment, including a third party credit card (ie. not Apple Pay), mass transit pass, a student card which has payment functionality in addition to key card access to doors. I guess Apple still has final say-so, so an individual can’t create an NFC for her home, or is this possible now? Then again, when it comes to zero-knowledge, do you really want Apple knowing when you open and close your doors? From a privacy perspective this is a double-edged sword.

The browser for me is still an issue. I know the question is more broad, but if Firefox could run natively on iOS, I’d feel substantially better about Apple’s promise to be more privacy-oriented. I don’t expect their platform to have zero telemetry, but it is larger projects like this that speak volumes to me because that indicates they at least entertain the notion of privacy for people who care enough to try to opt out of tracking (versus the many many individuals who are unaware or don’t care).

Doesn’t invalidate your larger point, but 2FA code completion is available to all apps: https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=z0i801mg

You still have to press the autofill at the top of the keyboard with this one.

> Inability to have non WKWebView type browsers. Safari can do the one it wants, which is Apples choice.

This is primarily for privacy and security reasons. One wouldn't want a funny casino app, or the likes of Google or Facebook to hijack people's web access.

Another aspect is the user experience - a piece of web content will render exactly the same way anywhere on the system. There is no need for people to be concerned with webapps asking absurd things like "Download browser X to view this page".

A third aspect is actually very helpful to developers - you can count on 100% of the APIs you intent to use being available on the system's web browser, creating in-app experiences significantly easier (and cheaper) to develop.

> A third aspect is actually very helpful to developers - you can count on 100% of the APIs you intent to use being available on the system's web browser, creating in-app experiences significantly easier (and cheaper) to develop.

This would still be true in the case where external web browsers were allowed - you can still rely on Webkit being available on all phones, but if you need access to APIs not provided by apple you can revert to bundling a different browser engine

Not if the user chooses a different default browser.

I doubt all the Chromium clones would evenly support "normal" iOS integrations, and the ability to (privately) deal with, for example, universal links, App Clips, or even that banner offering a website visitor to use the native app.

I understand the sentiment for wanting to use custom features on desktop, but a phone needs to be much more reliable than this - you can't have something working "sometimes" or for users to have to retry or change settings on the go. Imagine a stressful situation at the airport, and the app you are using needs you to switch browsers or download another app to work...

> or even that banner offering a website visitor to use the native app.

This is something that works just fine for me over on Android, in Firefox mobile. Actually, i assume that the mobile browsers would offer all of these capabilities, assuming apple allows access to, and documents their apis appropriately.

Why is it that we somehow defend apple having proprietary/exclusive Apis that nobody else has as good? It's essentially the same game as it was with internet explorer.

I think if apple just opened up their eco system the other browsers would support these features before long, or app developers would include them in their apps instead of relying on browsers.

It's not like apple is the only one with capable engineers, they just stop everyone else from using their stuff to the fullest

> you can still rely on Webkit being available on all phones

But then... folks will complain that some apps open content in Safari and not their preferred browser.

I work for a product agency, and the ability to rely on Safari has unlocked many possibilities for us. It's significantly easier to create a unique and beautiful experience (web or native) for iOS than it is for Android. This is further facilitated by the consistency and performance of the iPhone platform itself.

> This is primarily for privacy and security reasons

So we don't buy this as an excuse when government use it to justify searching your house without probable cause or silencing dissent.

But when a private company uses same excuse, somehow are we cool with it?

I don’t see how your analogy applies here. If anything you are making my point - by imposing some restrictions on third parties, users are not exposed to random companies sniffing their web browsing habits.

At this time there is but one of the FAANG(M) companies that has no commercial use for user data. This is Apple. You can see this reflected well in their products where we see hardware and software services that prioritise on-device processing + strict regulation for app developers not to abuse user trust.