It's 100% a reversal. Their previous statement was: "we will remove PWA support". Their new statement: "we won't remove PWA support, we will keep PWAs as they were in 17.3".

eh, you're both right. It's a 100% reversal of their decision to remove PWA support, but it's 100% consistent with their previous excuse/reason of it being too hard to support multiple browsers.

And yet you can run any browser engine on MacOS and the world hasn’t ended. This is a cash grab, it’s not about security and I don’t understand why people keep repeating that.

MacOS and iOS have different security architectures and different UX.

Let’s stop pretending any of it makes sense. Why are Mac app devs not charged the “Technology Fee”.

Because they don’t have to sell on the Mac App Store, they can use their own website. That has nothing to do with other browser engines being available.

And they still must pay the 100$ annually to sign and notarize.

Because MacOs is around 10 to 15% market share it make sense to use every incentive available to attract developers to another platform than Windows. There is a hidden technology fee, but it make more sense not to charge for it.

iOS is more like 50 to 55% market share so the goal is more to filter out bad actors and keep a high standard. Also let's milk that cash-cow.

I'm not necessarily agreeing with this approach but I got to admit it makes sense.

It’s NextSTEP all the way down

And they have different attack surfaces and vulnerabilities. In the abstract, our phones are (for better or worse) far more critical to our lives than our laptops. They go with us everywhere, they're increasingly our keys for various physical and digital access. They're off-board brains and backup. Generally speaking, I would say a compromised phone puts the average person in a worse situation than a compromised laptop.

Fine, but where’s the evidence alternate browser engines are such a massive security risk? I see none, but I see many billions of dollars Apple is making from applying a 30% tax on any app I buy. And to be clear, consumers pay that 30%, developers pass it on.

So why can't I benefit from a strong, secure virtualization on my phone, like I do with Qubes OS?

Why downvotes?

On MacOS, there are sandboxed apps, and not-sandboxed apps.

iOS never had a not-sandboxed option.

Wouldn't that make it safer to allow any app or rendering engine on iOS than on macOS then?

It seems like an argument against what Apple is claiming.

MacBook has 100wh battery, iPhone has 12wh. Chrome is notoriously inefficient, easy 2x more battery drain over Safari.

Running an inefficient app is the user's choice, not Apple's.

There's no legitimate choice without education.

The consumer would switch their PWA default engine in one of the half dozen "you have to agree to continue" buttons when Edge and Chrome install themselves and demand every privacy and security toggle be turned off (as Microsoft Teams demands when you try to run it in Safari*), and then all PWAs would be insecure and monitored by the adtech engines.

This weird idea to force Apple to have OS viewports use a foreign engine would not be 99.9% of users' real choice at all, just like the users who installed Avast anti-virus didn't choose to have all their browsing sold to adtech, or the users who chose "Private Browsing" in Chrome didn't choose to have Google recording that activity to the user's profile.

* Note: Because Teams is actually "just" a skin on many different services and the Apple+CloudFlare private browsing confuse the coupling.

> This weird idea to force Apple to have OS viewports use a foreign engine

That is not what people are saying. Nobody cares that MacOS renders half its content using WebKit on Mac. Same goes for iOS - people do care that they can't use a PWA in their browser of choice. It's anticompetitive blockage that will be inevitably brought-up when the compliance deadline rolls around.

> would not be 99.9% of users' real choice at all

No reasonable person can claim that. Alternative browser engines aren't even allowed yet, you don't know that.

> just like the users who installed Avast anti-virus didn't choose to have all their browsing sold to adtech, or the users who chose "Private Browsing" in Chrome didn't choose to have Google recording that activity to the user's profile.

Or the people who left notifications on and got their iPhone information slurped up by the NSA. Pobody's nerfect, right? Get the strawmen out of here before they start a fire.

> Nobody cares that MacOS renders half its content using WebKit on Mac. Same goes for iOS - people do care that they can't use a PWA in their browser of choice.

What does it mean to "use a PWA in their browser"? That's the opposite of what the PWA experience is supposed to be. You're not supposed to be aware you're in a browser -- and "people" defined as normals, not HN users, do are not.

The "reasonability" of my view about what consumers care about is informed by building both enterprise and mass market web, and later app, products since the 90s, helping countless clients study their users' actual preferences in depth.

Our, and well known, studies show the "man on the street" has zero comprehension of what a browser engine is much less how a PWA or even Electron works. In general, their priority is everything just working and tech being out of their way.

HN is among the least representative forums for recognizing "normal" user interests I've seen, almost to the point of parody.

> Get the strawmen out of here

Avast and Google debacles are first party software provider exploitations of user trust, not targeted surveillance or dragnet by a government. Lockdown mode shows the length to which Apple takes this class of problem seriously as well.

> What does it mean to "use a PWA in their browser"? That's the opposite of what the PWA experience is supposed to be.

What does it mean to use a PWA without a browser? It's impossible to operate without an HTML engine and accompanying logic.

Even playing by your logic, there should be an equal and fair opportunity for third-parties to make the same experience. That's what the DMA and DSA are all about, when you boil them down. If Apple has a button that lets you open PWAs in their engine, others should get the same opportunity. Web apps are portable, this is the design of the web as a whole. Apple can make it a problem in their browser or a problem in their OS, but it remains a problem all the same.

> Our, and well known, studies show the "man on the street" has zero comprehension of what a browser engine is much less how a PWA or even Electron works.

> HN is among the least representative forums for recognizing "normal" user interests I've seen, almost to the point of parody.

Then why bring up the users at all? Let's discuss these solutions on their technical merit, since we're on a technical forum. Apple's defense is paper-thin here, and your "runtime" rationalization doesn't work for any other platform, let alone the open web.

> Avast and Google debacles are first party software provider exploitations of user trust

So... your defense of Apple's failure is that they provide Lockdown mode? Shit, I might as well cite GDPR and Google Takeout if I had any interest in defending the sycophants.

Apple's debacles are an example of first-party exploitation of trust. If their definition of local security and individual privacy is subject to third-party demands, then they are fundamentally compromised. You're utterly detached if you think Apple's got a humanitarian heart for the Chinese citizens they help implicate. Lockdown Mode won't save them.

> The consumer would switch their PWA default engine in one of the half dozen "you have to agree to continue" buttons when Edge and Chrome install themselves and demand every privacy and security toggle be turned off (as Microsoft Teams demands when you try to run it in Safari), and then all PWAs would be insecure and monitored by the adtech engines.*

I suggest Apple takes inspiration from Android then, since that doesn't happen on Android. Maybe Android's security model is better.

This is solely about Apple getting a cut of App Store sales. They’ve been in cahoots with Google for years, as evidenced by the recent DoJ monopoly trial - “privacy” and “security” are marketing terms at Apple. Nothing more.

Source: Trust me bro, I've just made it up

> we will see calls that it is unfair Apple allows for one kind of web apps (on their own browser engine) but not others and that is self-preferencing.

We have been seeing people say that for years. And mostly, they've been right; Apple's treatment of WebKit and Safari was anti-PWA for years. Even today, Apple has zero competitors who could meaningfully encourage them to adopt new PWA features or change Safari on iPhone.

Exactly, the Safari team has been openly hostile to PWA for a decade.