I think this has turned out to be the current barrier in preventing Google from completing taking over the web standards space.
And then when they do implement similar browser standards, they don't follow any web standards, they instead make their own proprietary bespoke web standard for Safari[1].
And they also did other fun things like wait until nearly 2021 to support WebP and let Safari be the the #1 source of one-click exploits on iOS.
It's weird to see Safari trotted out in defense of web standards of all things.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/notifications/safari-push-notifi...
No matter what Apple itself does Safari being major non-Chromium browser helps Firefox a lot just by existing and having huge marketshare.
How does Apple releasing proprietary web standards just for Safari, like Safari Push Notifications, help in anyway with the purported problem of companies stamping out web standards without consensus? It seems like it's only a problem when Google does it, but when Apple does it, it's Safari "helping Firefox just exist".
And so I will be looking forward to the magical era of PWAs replacing all mobile applications because clearly push notifications was what was holding them back all these years.
Even though a tiny fraction of mobile apps use them but I guess we will ignore that.
Oh, definitely. But if they do (and don't at least give me a way to immediately opt out of that) the app is gone from my phone – and they have no other way of reaching me. Beats the absolute nightmare that is SMS notifications and spam, in my view.
Are you saying that Android has third party filters that surveil all your notifications in the name of blocking ones you might not want to see?
He was right and still is. Not that it's impossible to implement a good PWA, all you have to do is manage your state and interface in a way that no interaction takes longer than 50ms to compute. But most developers are not able to deliver than, most don't even think about UIs in this sort of way.
And V8 GC behaviour is still terrible and an unbelievable battery hog.
In June 2020, Apple declared a bunch of APIs they will not implement (https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-declined-to-implement-16...), in a big press blitz trying to make it look like they were some noble hero. Web MIDI (incredible fun), Web USB (very useful for Arduino using folk for example, who have excellent web-based tools), Magnetometer/Ambient Light/Battery/Proximity sensors, WebHID, Device Memory, and that's just the half. A week latter Mozilla put out a similar PR using the exact same Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) to try to make themselves look good, to declare themselves virtuous non-implementors.
Sure, I agree, not every site should have access to these sensors/capabilities. There are privacy risks of turning them on. But they're also excellent capabilities, that really help users do interesting things. Making users use less-secure less-sandboxed native apps is a downgrade. There should be some security regimes where these web techs can be permitted.
For a while Mozilla wasn't even reviewing a sizable chunk of web standards (tracked via the excellent https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/), just declaring them unsafe & leaving the convo. They've at least started going back to old Request for Positions & reviewing a good number of them, even if they don't intend to implement. And there's a good number of standards they have about-faced on, have accepted as real asks.
I don't know what to do about web standards. Google takes a lot of flak, but who is there to work with? Edge, a Chromium fork, has some pro-web attitude, and indeed drives some new features for Chromium & participates. But there's largely no one but Google+Edge to deal with left in the web standards implementer world. The other browser vendors are broadly against a lot of features, for reasons of malicious-self-interest. Meanwhile Chrome continues to have one of the most open, progressive, interactive, review-seeking, concensus-desiring, most mature & responsible feature-lifecycle processes the world has ever seen. There is nothing else on the planet that gets shipped with such a high bar, such a socially pro-active, such a well planned & democratic process for how the feature gets developed. It's the gold standard of standards. https://www.chromium.org/blink/launching-features/#launch-pr...
Really? I believe that they want to control the web.
Which of these Standards do you think Google will use to "control the web"? https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/
There's been an unmitigated use of Fear Uncertainty & Doubt, played with great effectiveness, against the top player. People keep ascribing to Google the role of platform-controller, like literally everyone else in history has done: IBM, Apple, Microsoft, all of which have used OSes to maintain control & dominance. Google is a search engine; they benefit from a rich healthy powerful competitive web. If Google did have "control" over the web, what would they do? What's the evil mastermind plan here?
Everything Google does goes through the Technical Architecture Group (TAG) and Security review. It's all open process. The checks are very real; even if no one can prevent them from implementing it would look very bad to disregard feedback, and thusfar they have not. Thusfar there seem to be extremely few examples of actual real scary things done. Web MIDI shipping without permissions was the most "egg on face" thing Google's done, and I have a hard time interpreting that as malicious. It has the hallmark of naively hopeful to me, and was easy enough to address.
The desire to see the browser teams as the enemy, as a foe, is a greatly harmful & reductive and alas popular outlook in my view. I don't think it's warranted, I don't think there's real evidence for it, and I stress again, Google has so far set the gold-standard for web standards accountability. They wouldn't have done that, they wouldn't continue that process, if they wanted to take control. The case here for taking-over seems absurd, has no clear outcome & only risk. Taking control is an existential risk, would jeopardize the web's success, could easily kill the Golden Goose that has made Google so wealthy & wise. People's fear here does not make business sense.
Might be they'll replace actual websites with Google own version to keep people in Google controlled ecosystem?
Or change APIs in their own nearly-monopolistic browser to make ad-blockers less efficient?
Or not implement extensions in their own browser so there are no ad-blockers at all?
Or push their user tracking system disguised as solution to increase privacy?
Or degrade quality of Google services when using competeting browsers?
This just shows that you don't understand AMP. Apple News replaces websites with only Apple News. AMP allows anybody to host the article.
> Or change APIs in their own nearly-monopolistic browser to make ad-blockers less efficient.
Only one browser has done this so far. It's Safari.
Google might not be a good actor, but trading it for a worse actor who won't let you use any other web clients is just cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Google has been putting profit over users’ best interests for a very long time now.
Make money? That's what companies do. When they get too big and too powerful (at the point where governments don't really have serious leverage over them), a third-party should probably split them.
> Taking control is an existential risk
Why do you think big companies open source code? To help humanity? If Android (AOSP) was not open source, OEMs would probably not take the risk of depending on it. But the Play Services are there for the lock-in. Protobuf being open source is better for Google than having to integrate with other systems out there. Why is Chromium open source? Well most "alternative" browsers are based on it, and Google controls it. And so on. Open sourcing code is a strategic decision. And the strategic decisions in a company are there to make more money, not to help the world. It's all about control.
> What I see is a lot of very sincere dedicated engineers coming up with helpful & rich ideas.
Sure. Because you work for Evil Corp does not mean you are not sincere and dedicated. Many good people work for Philip Morris, for many reason (maybe they have an interesting job, maybe good conditions, whatever the reason). The difference with Google is that most Philip Morris employees probably realize that their company is not a non-profit aiming at making the world a better place.
They did support me in Google Summer of Code before that (2005). I believe they gave me $5000 for the summer. I am still working to ship open source software pursuant to those ends, on my own personal time, to this day.
[Citation needed]
> Magnetometer/Ambient Light/Battery/Proximity sensors [...] Device Memory,
I don't have words to describe what a shockingly bad idea this is.
> A week latter Mozilla put out a similar PR using the exact same Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) to try to make themselves look good, to declare themselves virtuous non-implementors.
Maybe because it's a really fucking stupid idea, and the criticism of those APIs is not FUD.
Web Extensions for an example have all been pushed into stores for auditing purposes, because otherwise their functionality can and has changed via automatic updates, going from useful functionality to horrible privacy trainwrecks.
> Sure, I agree, not every site should have access to these sensors/capabilities. There are privacy risks of turning them on. But they're also excellent capabilities, that really help users do interesting things.
Sure, but they are still harmful. For instance, there is no body that says which websites are allowed to manage USB because they are Arduino Maker sites dispatching firmwares, and which ones are not allowed to because they'll attempt to zero day some mobile phone OS while it charges. And there is no technical protection against the former site suddenly becoming the latter via acquisition or exploit.
This is why the native app security and privacy models are fundamentally different from the web models - a store can require entry into a private contract by a real-world entity who is accountable (potentially criminally), of software under audit control.
Websites can be by random people outside any legal accountability.
On iOS, one of the major differences is that there is no expectation that people will doing ongoing management of granted permissions to a website. For this reason, things like geolocation access have to be re-granted periodically. This is also a reason why push notifications (as a more durable permission) require the PWA to be "promoted" to an app on the Home Screen on iOS.
That is incorrect because Apple has prevented and still prevents Firefox from properly implementing Gecko on iOS. Apple also restricts Firefox and browsers other than Safari from implementing full WebExtensions. Even though Firefox and browsers other than Safari are required to use WebKit on iOS, they are not allowed to access many of WebKit's iOS-integrated features including content blockers and Safari extensions.
All of these Apple-imposed handicaps make Firefox a much less competitive browser on iOS than it could be, and in no way helps Firefox because users generally prefer to use the same browser across their devices. The EU's upcoming browser choice legislation will prohibit Apple's anticompetitive restrictions to put Firefox on a more level playing field with Safari on iOS.
The commenter was not even saying that their point justifies Safari being the only browser engine available on iOS. They were making a specific point. If you don’t want to talk to that point, maybe try another thread.
newsflash: many users hate pwa, they prefer native apps
It's also ironic to bring up Apple's hindering of web standards as evidence of anti-monopolization of standards, considering the fact that the lack of PWA support forces users to use the proprietary App Store monopoly to install apps instead.
IMHO, that's very naive. Look at ElectronJS apps. I hate ElectronJS, still the most used apps on my Desktop computer are ElectronJS. Why? Because I don't have a choice, because it's cheaper for the developers.
Before ElectronJS, I actually had real desktop apps. So yeah, I see the case against PWAs.
Then you should support PWA as an alternative. It's lighter weight, both lower memory and download size, compared to electron.
PWAs would be cheaper to develop overall than building 2-3 separate code bases. Which would mean more software available generally, particularly from bootstrapped companies.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that native go away.
But that's my point: that's exactly the promise of every single cross-platform system out there. But in my experience, that's generally not true for non-trivial apps (ever heard "write once, debug everywhere"?). And second, it usually makes for worse UX on all platforms.
I feel like many people consider PWAs as a totally new thing, but at the end of the day, it's a cross-platform system. There are tons of those; just look around, cross-platform is not a silver bullet.
Every non web cross platform system doesn't have nearly the investment as browsers do for quality and compatibility. It's not even close. Like, orders of magnitude. I don't like the cross platform toolkits either.
Let's not pretend the web as a platform is the same m'kay? People use it every day from all of these devices, like billions of people. This isn't some unknown, where this speculation is reasonable either. There are issues, but it's not equivalent.
I hate PWAs because I like good native apps, and PWAs give an opportunity for developers to replace their native app with a cross-platform web app. And in my experience, cross-platform generally comes at the cost of app quality on a single platform. Instead of hiring developers who know iOS, you now hire web developers who debug their web app on many platforms they don't really know well.
And that's most certainly because Apple enforces more UX consistency on iOS apps.
Until the issue is fixed and the goal posts are moved once again.
Because PWAs have been available in one form or another for 14 years.
And it's always because that the UX is terrible that makes them not viable not anything Apple has done.
Obvious counter points.
Lots of people use websites. Which have an identical UX experience to PWAs.
A significant percentage of the app store is web view based apps that are near equivalents to PWAs. Been that way for years.
If people love native so much, why do sites like Reddit and LinkedIn heavily push mobile web users to the app? Seems it's not a universal opinion.
Because that's how sites can avoid the privacy features that are inherent to browsers.
What proportion of visitors to the LinkedIn site use the app? I'm guessing it's pretty small.
For people who just want the best possible app/phone experiences, PWAs are awful.
The real differentiator with native vs pwa is their ability to track the user.
Heavens no. I do not want to be forced to install an app for every single little thing - it's wasteful, detrimental to my security and privacy. Small examples from a recent trip: in Andalusia, there's a bunch of cities with very interesting old buildings (cathedrals, castles remaining from the Muslim era converted by the Spanish monarchs later on, etc.). Each and every one has a different app for their audio guide, map, etc. to help you navigate and understand them. It's just stupid, it's a one time thing and it could easily be served by a website; instead you have to download a 30-40 MB app for each one, and then remember to delete it afterwards.
I don't know if this is substantially true. When I hear of PWA features that people complain about, they are almost always things that Google Chrome as its own app with its own web engine can't add to the underlying OS, such as:
- robust background processing
- background push notifications
- new video codecs (on a power-constrained device)
- system-wide protocol handlers
- web bluetooth/webUSB/webNFC
- adding their own new synthetic "app" representing the PWA to the Home Screen.
Many of the things people talk about with PWAs are not anything close to a web "standard" or even a recommendation - Google implemented them, because they were pressured internally to make a web-based programming environment for Chromebooks.
> [1] https://developer.apple.com/notifications/safari-push-notifi...
Both macOS and iOS have honest-to-goodness push notification support now.
"I used the monopoly to destroy the monopoly."
Actually I believe you're wrong: if people actually preferred Apple's way of doing it, Apple would have no reason to restrict other ways.
They restrict it because people prefer the other way, and that would harm Apple's profits.
You're saying this like there isn't any trash on the Apple App Store? Come on... Beyond the top lists or other discovery models, the Apple App Store contains bunch of things that will never even be downloaded by anyone...
It was more exclusive in the beginning, I give you that. But today, it has as much trash as any other app store.
And that's one of the values of Apple: this vertical integration that makes the overall thing look more polished (and probably easier to use to some extent).
Of course, they are happy to keep the restriction because they can take 30% commission on the paid apps, I'm not saying they are perfect and that there is nothing to improve. But I am not completely convinced that forcing them to lower their standards of integration (by allowing any kind of apps) is necessarily beneficial for the users.
After all, why do developers want PWAs? Probably mostly because it is cheaper for them, not because it's better for their users, right?
Wrong, PWAs can provide better services for users, and the lack of PWAs and enforcement of the App Store monopoly can hurt them[1]:
> The fact that Apple refuses to implement basic features in mobile Safari that Firefox and Chrome have had for years now, and the fact that they refuse to allow other browser engines on iOS is the reason why we can't have nice things like progressive web apps.
> I recently worked on a health app related to the COVID pandemic. The most common use case would be served really well by a PWA, and as such, there's no reason users would need to install an app on their phones to access the web app's full set of features.
> Despite the web app working perfectly on Android and across Windows, Linux and macOS without native integration, we now must dedicate time and resources to develop an additional iOS app just so iOS users, which over half of Americans are, aren't left out.
> This is an expensive endeavor time-wise and money-wise, during a pandemic where time is of the essence and resources are stretched thin. It shouldn't be this way, but it is.
Seems like you do confirm my points.
I am not saying that users can never benefit from PWAs. I am saying that globally, I am not convinced that PWAs will improve the life of iOS users. Just like I don't feel like Electron is improving my life. Slack would maybe have to make a proper app if they did not have Electron, it's not like Salesforce doesn't have the money. I could even go further: if it was actually expensive for such companies to write apps for the platforms they need to support, maybe they would open their APIs. Slack/Discord are glorified IRC messengers, I would love to have a lightweight client to use them (instead of getting a full copy of Chromium for each).
A yet there are a ton of low effort and literal fart apps on the App Store[1].
They don’t even see difference between PWA and apps.
If everything becomes PWA, there is no transparency for the apps. No indication what data they collect. No control for the quality of the apps. No moderation over malicious apps.
PWAs need more permissions to provide the functionality people need, it is not just website.
The point is the experience, not the name of it.
The problem with statements like that, aside from the loftiness, is that you end up with a world where people who think they know better get to decide. I worked in the public sector digitalisation, and while I’m a programmer we were bundled with the rest of IT so I experienced what the supporters had to deal with. This included a lot of employees who genuinely couldn’t tell if the device they needed help for was an iOS or Android device without some guidance. So I’m not going to dispute the claims you make about how it’s nice to protect the “average person” from themselves, but I don’t think any of us will like the what that sort of thinking creates. Well, maybe some people will, but a lot won’t.
I recently wanted something for my two-factor keys and the best all I could find was for Android but not iOS. I ended up filming over a few $ for a Bitwarden subscription, but there are just a lot of little stories like that. I mean, I’m not in the audience for Fortnite, but I’m sure a lot of people were sad when it left iOS. A of which can be avoided if we stop giving all the power to the tech companies.
I’m not sure Apple really has anything to fear from it either in terms of security or usability. Part of the reason they sell so well, at least to me, is that they have the ease of use and tech that works out of the box. It’s very rare that I need side loading. I’m not a huge fan of the Safari enforcement, but it doesn’t really bother me either as I can still use FireFox and the sync. I think Google might have more to fear from it, since they need to peddle commercials inside apps like YouTube, and you can block that if they allow you to side-load app blockers, but for Apple I think almost everyone will just keep on trucking. It will of course hurt their control over payments, like the original poster points out, but that’s not really “my” or the “average persons” problem.
Sideloading will hit hard for Apple's pro-privacy brand.
You lose transparency and quality control for the apps. They don't need to tell you about their data collection practices. They don't have to do actually anything at all, since you can't ban those apps anymore.
Phishing is still a problem of Android and that will become a problem on iOS too. On Android there is still business for anti-virus engines because of the sideloading and Phishing. On Apple devices, there isn't really need for anti-virus but it will become relevant again.
If the sideloading will become very easy, big players who make money with data collection, will leave the platform. You won't find Meta apps soon from the App store. They are so big that people will download these apps regardless.
If that happens, how many fake Instagram apps we will see after that? And you can't ban them from the App store anymore.
So it appears the non-average person doesn't have a clue what's right for the clueless masses either.
Liberty, choice, community and respect. That's all that is needed.
Respect, as you say, is important. Leaf by example.
I was referring into technical implementations and what risks are included. It requires deep undertanding how these things work. Average user does not have it. Many aspects are invisible to the end-users, like the war against malware in App Store.
The end-user knows what they want in terms of end-result. How to to get the job done with a tool (app). They can compare end-results.
Sometimes, however not all results all there to be compared. Because, they don’t understand what kind of tools can be actually created. They are happy with the current one because they think it is the best what can be.
Or, what else the tool can do besides their advertised functionality. Which can be malicious or harmful to user in another way.
Or tools could work in a better way, but are currently hindered for monetary gain.
All this requires specialised knowledge.
If PWA is cheaper to make, companies will go there. Whether or not it's better for the users. Companies want to make money, not help users.
Yea but Apple is a company too…
If I don't like PWAs but WhatsApp stops supporting anything else, how can I use WhatsApp without the PWA?
What would be great would be for them to have some kind of API to let people write their own clients. Maybe there are big downsides with that (Loss of control? Having to keep backward compatibility?) but I don't really see them.
Apple is the market here. If people wants to have PWAs they do not buy Apple products.
But in reality "the market decide" is not common sense - that is why we have regulations.
On the other side, if users want standard UI and that's a factor in adoption, wouldn't people making PWAs then just make the apps in such a way - there's nothing stopping them, and there's no lack of UI libraries enabling that.
I'd say look at popular cross-platform frameworks, and tell me if you think that cross-platform apps generally look native. I don't.
It should be my choice
Nobody, least of all oneself, knows what one wants (except in the moment; I want some peanuts) so we have to be told. And you certainly do have a choice, so long as it’s the right one.
You have a choice, if you don’t like it buy an Android phone. Or a Sailfish phone, or a KDE phone our one of the other open source phones where the only “apps” are low quality PWA crap. Look how successful they are.
Do you think that's because of PWA UX being inherently crappy and not, say, the fact that those projects don't have billion (or trillion) USD companies behind them? I think you're mistaking the effect for the cause.
PWAs are a way of lowering the barrier of entry for new devs and that's important if you want to achieve any scale.
> You have a choice
It's kind of a like a thug saying that I have a choice between being slapped in the face, kicked in the butt or subscribing to his Twilight fanfic podcast. Yes, I do have a choice, but neither of the choices is really something I'm looking forward to. Betamax vs. VHS comes to mind too.
I think the line of thinking in the parent comment is a bit naive. There's nothing inherently wrong with PWAs from the UX pov if we take monopolies and FUD into account. That's the reason it is harder to build a PWA with really good UX now (harder but not impossible).
A bad native app can require the gps permission, but a bad PWA app will be able to do the same, right?
I really don't think that sandboxing is a good argument in favour of PWAs, honestly.
Gaming on mobile friggen sucks and that is primarily because Apple wants to retain control and the biggest piece of the pie.
Gaming in mobile browsers, in 2023, should be as easily accessible as it were in desktop browser in the Flash days. Apple just won’t come to the table to facilitate a decent gaming experience in Safari.
Let’s also not forget Steve Jobs was all for web standards in his letter against Flash. Apple should make good on what was promised in that letter instead of dragging their feet.
https://newslang.ch/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Thoughts-on-F...
UX isn’t half bad either. It actually feels pretty native most of the time.
Even on your run-off-the-mill desktop web browser, push notifications do not come “for free”. You need a service worker. You need a specific server implementation. It’s not just the Notification API.
(Plus I don't want to actually deal with full Outlook because I have zero interest in accessing my work mail privately, whereas I do need to take a look at my work calendar in order to avoid accidentally double-booking myself.)
It doesn't need Apple to white Knight on behalf of their poor, dim, uninformed users.
Because they're not.
A lot of viruses (and jailbreaks on iOS amongst others) are distributed via this browser / sandbox; it's only secure in theory and it took decades to get to that point.
Sure (before the Rust evangelists swoop in), part of that was due to using unsafe languages; part was due to extension frameworks that had too much power (ActiveX, which was even used to update your operating system, I can't fathom why they thought that was a good idea). But it'll take many more years of zero incidents, jailbreaks, etc before I'd trust the browser over Apple's app sandboxing and app review and distribution approach.
Chrome and Firefox are as secure as Safari, if not more, banning them is a commercial choice not a technical one.
iOS exploits still exist, there's no real advantage in Apple sandboxing apps, they are routinely leaking users data and being exploited as well.
OTOH Apple refusing to implement certain web standards is proof that they cannot guarantee a safe implementation, which is a reason more to allow better browsers on their platform.
This Apple native crud they force every app to use (up to the whole browser engine, like in the IE days!) is truly the ActiveX of our times. Only you can't even get rid of it.
You can exploit in both native and browser contexts. Most jailbreaks nowadays are assisted by a native application that you dev-sign to deliberately pwn yourself with. In the past we had websites that you could use to jailbreak with. Both are sandboxed environments with significant attackable surface area, so one is not necessarily more trustworthy than the other purely on measures of exploitability.
I think this plan will move forward because of consumer protections afforded in the EU (ie including sideloaded apps) not available elsewhere.
See the Xbox Cloud Gaming "app" for instance, which is outside the App Store, just launch then "Add to Home Screen", close, and run from Home Screen.
https://www.xbox.com/en-us/play
As for what can be done with browsers, see the venerable iCab but also Kagi's Orion browser which runs Firefox and Chrome extensions, even on iOS. Yes, it's WebKit based, but so was Chrome for a long time.
https://help.kagi.com/orion/browser-extensions/macos-extensi...
Given you can run Xbox games or arbitrary extensions from other browsers, it's clear the web app and WebKit limits are less restrictive than most discussion acknowledges.
For the last few features that used to be missing, like notifications or other native hooks, notice Microsoft has the sidecar native app for iOS that handles in-game chat, LAN discovery for Xbox setup, and notifications.
You and the OP are both right about fullscreen. There is a web fullscreen API, which Apple does not support. However, PWAs strip out the browser UI so you’re effectively fullscreen. Though you can’t do anything about the status bar, nor can you lock screen orientation.
But more to the original point, none of this has anything to do with security. Apple disallowed a native Xbox streaming app because they demanded a cut of the revenue and MS wasn’t willing to give it.
When home screen apps first came out we built some for clients and if I recall correctly, lack of browser UI was default.
(it actually isn’t by default, it requires specific flag, but it’s more or less what everyone considers to be a standard for PWAs)
It's the same with privacy. Forcing app publishers to state what user data is being sucked out of their phones was just a poor PR stunt.
Nothing has changed. Applications still require payments in form of contact lists (which is more or less illegal in Europe if you don't have permission of all people in your address book to share their names and phone numbers), disguised as helping users check if their friends are using a service, or to even allow user to use some app functionality.
Unimaginative accountant that currently leads Apple on one hand bullshits public opinion when disallowing Facebook to steal data from users' devices and, on the other hand, after blocking Zuckerberg's ability to do so, he disgracefully used children protection to announce that Apple will now inspect users' data under the pretense of looking for child porn.
Apple users are being deprived of OS control with most of updates and it's always done under the untruthful pretense of increasing security or protecting users' privacy.
When this little man finally pushes ads to core macOS, he'll state that it's to help users.
On the other hand, there's little non privacy-invasive apps of certain types and corporations make good use of users' inability to pick lesser evil.
App Store helps them a lot, too, because to see what invasive practices developer/publisher uses, one has to click on app title to see details, while having a very comfortable "GET" button as the only button and only thing that looks clickable on the list.
Cook's typical smoke and mirrors approach.
What? It seems like you were trying to make a coherent argument but a list of contacts is in no way comparable to a paid subscription. Microsoft doesn't allow you to buy O365 with your contacts, do they?
[source needed] as GDPR doesn't apply to private individuals and private databases
To this day the browser is still a second-tier experience to native apps. But that's fine, because anything you get from the macOS and iOS app stores are sandboxed too. So are non-App Store apps on macOS that choose to run in sandbox.
However, they then bizarrely and deliberately refuse to actually police the store, to an alarming and almost cartooninsh level. We’ve seen this time and time again: scan apps remain on the store for months despite being reported. Take just last month when fake Authenticator apps flooded the AppStore to take advantage of Twitter getting rid of mobile phone based 2FA, and not only were those apps allowed on the store, but often managed to get top recommendation.
At least on the web the expectation is that it’s the wild west and you should be careful what you install. On the AppStore it’s as if Apple has purposefully invested effort into creating the perfect mark for von artists: convincing their customers that a shark infested pool is totally safe to swim in.
And this is the undeniably bad stuff, it doesn’t even touch on the “grey area” of these disgusting children’s casino apps that dominate the AppStore, and that Apple shares the profit on to the tune of 15-30%. The incentives are all broken. Apple profits when scam apps buy ad-placement using real apps names for keywords. Apple profits from apps that convince kids to buy garbage IAP.
It would be one thing if the AppStore actually lived up to its supposed principles, at the cost of hurting competition, innovation, and the occasional frustrating developer rejection. There’s actually be a trade-off to discuss, and we’d actually be arguing about principles, and whether safety matters vs. freedom blah blah blah. Hell, as a parent, there’s versions of a well managed AppStore that I’d probably begrudgingly accept.there be a “can’t argue with the results” thinking there.
But that’s not what this is, and I’m tired of pretending toy is in arguments that defend the AppStore. It’s been 15 years, the AppStore isn’t in beta, it’s not “a work in progress”, there’s no room for arguing about its vision vs it’s “current” reality. The AppStore has shown us what it actually is: a supremely lazy and un creative business cudgel that serves neither developers nor customers, and instead serves Apple first and ironically Apple competitors and criminals second. How does it serve Apple competitors you ask? Consider that companies like Amazon are offered special AppStore rates. Little developers don’t get that, big companies do. So not only does the AppStore exhibit monopolistic behavior, it also props up other monopolies.
Also, the search sucks and it’s ugly. It feels like a free samples booth at a Costco. No one at Apple has any taste anymore. Not really relevant to the argument, but just want to point out there’s zero to be proud of in that product.
Their motivation is most definitely money now. Maybe not in the start though. Whatever their motives are though I’m super satisfied as a customer that they haven’t went down the android path of version calamity, an app store that I have zero trust in as an app buyer. Also tell me an android flavor the supports devices purchased 6 years ago? It’s a package deal. Having the wealth that is generated by the things that the EU has mandated will cause cuts in other areas of device support and/r&d. The option is making less profit or bumping prices to offset. In time we will see.
I think it would be great of Apple to just stop selling devices in the EU as a thanks to politicians who voted for this ill advised rule. I’d like to see how long it would take for them to roll it back because you know they would eventually buckle to the people.
To you and those of like thinking just assert your freedom of choice and go buy an android device along with the shit show it is and leave us to our relatively safe walled garden.
wait, so it wasn't money before? when they ran all those ads and did all of that 'we're the only privacy company' marketing? i guess it worked really well. when some of it was kinda just, reframing of lacking features and capabilities, and their 'closed ecosystem/walled garden' structure, as 'more secure'.
If you don’t like IOS in it’s current form don’t buy it but don’t knowingly buy it knowing it’s not what you want. Don’t be the noisy spoiled 1% of our society and try and make the rest conform to your ideals. Go choose something else to ruin.
If enough consumers vote with their wallet Apple will take notice. In this case that is the correct way to pursue change.
I'm not sure how they are motivated but in a report Apple cited:
>In Nokia’s 2021 threat intelligence report, Android devices made up 50.31% of all infected devices, followed by Windows devices at 23.1%, and macOS devices at 9.2%. iOS devices made up a percentage so small as to not even be singled out, being instead bucketed into “other”.
I personally use iOS and got it for my mum and aunt etc as it seems to suffer much less from malware in normal usage. I'm not sure if there is any evidence to the contrary?
Genuinely looking for evidence of this counterpoint you're making. As the evidence for the security angle is proven. iOS takes less than 1% of malware, Android takes nearly 50%, in between we have Windows, IoT devices and even MacOS taking more malware than iOS.
So where's the data that this strategy isn't working to protect iOS devices? I want to see it.
There is a great tool to increase security: the browser and its sandbox. You don't need to install anything fishy on your phone, and the sandbox rights coukd be sufficient for many apps.
But as an example, Apple denies the full screen feature for websites and even PWA... only installed ones. There's no good reason except favoring apps/appstore. For security? Works great on Android.
And you cannot use a third party browser, since they forbid that (all are Safari based)
Thank you, EU!!