News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly. Parent comment

Re:U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone mon... by tpmoney on Thursday March 21, 2024 @09:17PM (#39786462)
The flip side of this as a consumer is that I'm happy that mandating safari on iOS means I can be relatively sure any given site is going to work in Safari. I'm glad I don't live in the days where I needed 3 separate browsers on my computer (Safari, Firefox and IE) to ensure that I can use websites when I need to. In "ye olde days", even if you were using Safari for most of your browsing because it gave the best battery life on MacOS, you'd run into some sites that wouldn't work with it. You'd try Firefox maybe next, hoping that it was just some site that didn't have any developers who knew what a mac was. But even then, you'd run into sites where, no the problem was the developers just assumed everyone used IE and used a bunch of IE specific stuff.

I can't remember the last time I saw a "this site only works in XYZ" message. Some of that is a lot of modern sites are all built on big frameworks, but some of that is also because only supporting Safari, or only supporting Chrome or only supporting IE is going to lose you huge swaths of customers.

What if I don't want to switch browsers for the "best experience" when using your app? What if I want you to make your app the best experience on my browser of choice?

As always these things are tradeoffs and balances.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone mon... by crabmusket on Thursday March 21, 2024 @10:21PM (#39786828)
> What if I don't want to switch browsers for the "best experience" when using your app? What if I want you to make your app the best experience on my browser of choice?

What if I cannot do that due to there being no incentive for Apple to support web standards in Safari?

We don't want our users to have to switch browsers, but that leaves us with no ability to use lots of the features that make modern web apps competitive at all with native apps.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone mon... by tpmoney on Thursday March 21, 2024 @10:31PM (#39786895)
Like I said, it's all tradeoffs. It's worth noting though that software companies definition of "best experience" and the consumer definition of "best experience" aren't always in sync, and plenty of Apple's restrictions align more with the consumers version of things. The most obvious example is mandating apps ask for tracking permissions, or location permission or access to photos and calendars. I'm sure Facebook and Google and plenty of other vendors would argue the "best experience" is a seamless one where the user doesn't need to be bothered with such minutia. And yet, I for one am quite glad they can't deliver their "best experience" to me.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone mon... by jquery on Friday March 22, 2024 @01:15AM (#39787656)
True. On my iPhone, I just did an extremely complicated checkout flow involving registration on multiple websites as well as a credit check, and it worked like a charm.

Several years ago I wouldn't have even bothered trying to do that on my phone. There is some benefit to Safari being so ubiquitous.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone mon... by fennecbutt on Friday March 22, 2024 @08:38AM (#39790086)
Why not just have the government mandate that the only browser in the world is now Safari for everyone on every platform then?

Then all websites would be designed for the one browser!!

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone mon... by tpmoney on Friday March 22, 2024 @12:51PM (#39792526)
Because then there would only be one option? How did you go from "hey the fact that Apple has enough clout these days and control over iOS to ensure that the web doesn't suck as bad for alt browser users like it did in the IE days is a good thing" to "it would be awesome if the federal government outlawed all other browsers"
[ Parent | on HN ]