Then you would agree it’s fair to rephrase your original post as “It’s quite possible to install native code on the device you ostensibly own unless you want ultimate device control”?

Your phrasing doesn't make sense. Whether you "want" ultimate device control or not is irrelevant because you can't have it. The relevant thing is that Apple retains ultimate control, you never have it, and Apple uses that control to extract rent. My original phrasing is correct and doesn't need to be changed.

BTW I forgot to mention that the "Chromium for iOS" that you linked to is not a "non-Safari browser". It is the same Safari-wrapper version of Chromium that you can already get from the App Store. The "popular belief" is correct. There is currently no port of any alternative browser engine for iOS. Why would anyone bother to maintain an iOS port for software that can't be practically distributed?

No the popular belief is not correct. Perhaps the link the wrong, but you can mmap W^X and roll your own JIT, which is the only syscall preventing non-safari browsers.

> Why would anyone bother to maintain an iOS port for software that can't be practically distributed?

There is very little difference between a Mac and iOS app these days, and could be practically none at all if engineered correctly.

LOL you think it would be easy to just recompile Blink/V8 for iOS and get a browser you could actually use day-to-day? How many web browsers have you worked on? I have done several years of work on both Chromium and WebKit and I'm here to tell you that an iOS port of Blink and V8 good enough to actually use as a replacement for WebKit on iOS is going to require a huge coordinated effort of a large number of engineers, with a large ongoing maintenance cost afterward. It would probably require a ton of private APIs other than mmap W^X, too.

You're not going to be able to do it in your spare time. You probably wouldn't even be able to get a crippled and buggy version to build at all by yourself. Google's not going to invest in it for no reason while Apple expressly prohibits distribution. The only way there will ever be an alternative browser engine ported to iOS is if the EU actually follows through with forcing Apple to allow alternative browser engines on their App Store and/or alternative app stores, and Apple subsequently loses all of their inevitable appeals in court. Only then would Google (or Mozilla) be able to justify the investment.

Well fortunately the JIT-less work has been done already. One entitlement and a compiler flag away from being done!

https://v8.dev/docs/cross-compile-ios

... except even just in that page there's at least one important feature listed as not supported on iOS (pointer compression) and I'm willing to bet that there are many other issues you'd need to fix before you could call a fully functional V8 iOS JIT port "done". And V8 is only one of dozens of components in the whole browser engine. You are vastly underestimating the complexity of these projects.

Are you sure my first link I originally posted wasn’t a full rendering engine? I know I had read it was included a few years ago. Looks like a custom renderer to me:

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/refs/he...

I am absolutely certain. Chromium on iOS wraps WebKit and adds some features mentioned in the comments in that file, such as translation. But it's still just a wrapper and the rendering engine is still WebKit, not Blink. If you don't believe me, here is the implementation of CWVWebView where it creates the underlying WKWebView: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:ios...