I guess what I’m saying is that unless legislation or a court make Apple support other browsers, expect nothing. Apple won’t acquiesce just because technical users and developers don’t like having to use WebKit.

Despite it being a terrible decision, I don’t think it affects Apple’s bottom line positively at all to support other browser engines: they won’t make any money off it, will create headaches for themselves since they need to expand their security surface and do some technical work to support it, and cede control to competitors. Approximately nobody (weighted by financial impact to Apple - whether Firefox uses WebKit or not is, as far as I can tell, completely irrelevant to Apple’s bottom line) is deciding not to release on iOS because of WebKit.

I'd wonder if EU antitrust laws could give them something to gain: namely, not being fined. There's a concept of market fairness in EU antitrust law that isn't present in the equivalent US rules, such that price is not the only consideration.

I'd be surprised if this couldn't be turned towards pushing for greater user choice as it was when MS was bundling internet explorer for years. If memory serves, it was competition law which was used to undo that.

They risk losing market share if another unsupported browser is seen as sufficiently superior that users avoid choosing Apple products on that basis. I don't even mind Safari, but I'm still in no hurry to lock myself into the iPhone ecosystem, partly due to those sorts of restrictions.

Other browsers are allowed, just not other browser engines. The reasons for this are technical, not arbitrary or business related. Google, Firefox, Brave et al still get the market advantages of having iOS users on their platforms, and they can and do ship their own unique browser interface features. That should count as competition.

I strongly disagree. The browser engine is hugely important. It took Apple years and years to implement features like WebGL and WebRTC, those simply cannot be grafted onto an existing engine by a wrapper app. Without any meaningful competition Apple were happy to sit on those features and implement at their own leisure. That isn't real competition.

Another example: earlier this year it was revealed that Safari had a huge security hole in its IndexedDB implementation:

https://safarileaks.com

There's absolutely nothing that a web browser maker could do about it. They fall victim to the exact same bugs that Safari does because they have to way to avoid it. Again, not real competition. They also broke localStorage in iOS 14.1 and took three months to fix it. Because there's nothing forcing their hand.

> The reasons for this are technical, not arbitrary or business related.

Oh my sweet summer child. Apple has many business incentives to push native solutions over web-based ones. We'll never know exactly what motivates them or why but to totally dismiss any business incentives at work here seems naive.