In Its Tantrum With Europe, Apple Broke Web Apps in iOS 17 Beta - Slashdot
source link: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/24/02/08/1852237/in-its-tantrum-with-europe-apple-broke-web-apps-in-ios-17-beta
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In Its Tantrum With Europe, Apple Broke Web Apps in iOS 17 Beta
An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple has argued for years that developers who don't want to abide by its rules for native iOS apps can always write web apps. It has done so in its platform guidelines, in congressional testimony, and in court. Web developers, for their part, maintain that Safari and its underlying WebKit engine still lack the technical capabilities to allow web apps to compete with native apps on iOS hardware. To this day, it's argued, the fruit cart's laggardly implementation of Push Notifications remains subpar. The enforcement of Europe's Digital Markets Act was expected to change that -- to promote competition held back by gatekeepers. But Apple, in a policy change critics have called "malicious compliance," appears to be putting web apps at an even greater disadvantage under the guise of compliance with European law. In the second beta release of iOS 17.4, which incorporates code to accommodate Europe's Digital Markets Act, Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) have been demoted from standalone apps that use the whole screen to shortcuts that open within the default browser. This appears to solely affect users in the European Union, though your mileage may vary. Concerns about this demotion of PWAs surfaced earlier this month, with the release of the initial iOS 17.4 beta. As noted by Open Web Advocacy -- a group that has lobbied to make the web platform more capable -- "sites installed to the home screen failed to launch in their own top-level activities, opening in Safari instead."
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Why would anyone think that Apple would not react to the EU's brazen attempts to take away revenue?
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Why - because they think all this stuff happens in a vacuum, and if they merely decree something, it will automagically happen as they expect.
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Actually, it seems odd, at least without some additional context.
To fight EU regulations that threaten their bottom line, ok, at least logically consistent.
To apparently antagonize then by downgrading the PWA experience only for Europe? On the surface that seems uselessly petty. It doesn't advance apple business objectives, and doesn't help then navigate the EU regulations, it just pisses off people for no reason.
Now maybe there's additional context, like it was a bug that was a side effect of work to modify facets of ios in Europe. But given the data given, it is absolutely a surprise.
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Actually, it seems odd, at least without some additional context.
Not really knowledgeable about the internals, but it would not suprise me if PWA rely on special capabilities only available on Safari which Apple doesn't want to make available to third-party browsers.
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That sounds like a reasonable guess and probably partly true.
But I also wonder if it's to make sure that PWAs keep working exactly the same, as none of the current PWAs would have been tested on any other browser.
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To apparently antagonize then by downgrading the PWA experience only for Europe? On the surface that seems uselessly petty. It doesn't advance apple business objectives, and doesn't help then navigate the EU regulations, it just pisses off people for no reason.
Now maybe there's additional context, like it was a bug that was a side effect of work to modify facets of ios in Europe. But given the data given, it is absolutely a surprise.
It's likely a result of the EU law. Think about it for a second - the DMA r
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Yet you can use any browser you want in Android, and it doesn't have this problem. Firefox implemented this a long time ago:
https://www.thurrott.com/mobil... [thurrott.com]
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Every time one something like this happens, people seem to imagine a billionaire cabal plotting petty revenge and unleashing some vast planned conspiracy.
Almost every time.. it's just Galactus.
https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ?s... [youtu.be]
A hundred unrelated decisions and compromises leave some hapless engineer with only bad options, and this is the best they could do and they hate it, and everyone will hate them and no one will ever wish them a happy birthday.
Because Omega star couldn't get their shit together
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It makes perfect sense to me that this is just a natural consequence of Apple obeying the EU's rule.
- Web apps require a browser.
- Apple must allow a choice of browser.
- There is no standard mechanism to tell a browser to render a page without displaying its UI (aka kiosk mode).
- So web apps end up getting launched in the user's default browser with full browser UI. Including in Safari, because if they treated Safari differently they'd get sued for giving Safari privileges not afforded the other browsers.
I don't see a way Apple could, in the near term, do anything differently. In the longer term they could define some sort of standard "web app" flag that any browser could detect so it could hide its UI or take other appropriate steps. Or not, however it chooses.
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Apple must allow a choice of browser but the store rules limit that choice and what ones can be in the main store.
or an more open but a dev fee loaded alt store. -
It makes perfect sense to me that this is just a natural consequence of Apple obeying the EU's rule.
- Web apps require a browser.
- Apple must allow a choice of browser.
- There is no standard mechanism to tell a browser to render a page without displaying its UI (aka kiosk mode).
Having a web app open in a different browser than the one it was created in would be catastrophic, whether the user changed the default browser or not. There's no guarantee that a specific web app will work at all in a different browser, much less be usable.
Worse, moving a web app from one browser engine to another would prevent you from having access to any content stored with the initial browser engine, so the current design effectively makes it harder for users to change the default browser by ensuring that it would break all of their web apps, which is likely to be a clear violation of the law in question.
There's only one way that Apple can implement this without running afoul of the law: Make the web app open in whatever app created it. Provide a public API that allows third-party browsers to register a web app on the home screen that opens in their browser with a specific URL scheme chosen by the app developer.
With that approach, when the user changes browsers, it won't break existing web apps. And if the user later decides to run a web app in a different browser for some bizarre reason, the user will still have the ability to delete the web app and re-create it with a different browser (or create a second one with the other browser).
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Access to other browsers' data is something we need to open up. On desktop systems, Firefox can import everything from Chrome. On iOS and Android, it can't.
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Access to other browsers' data is also potentially a huge privacy/security concern, so if it gets opened up, it needs to be with explicit user permission, and that permission needs to go away upon the very next launch.
But I'm not talking about simple data like bookmark data and autofill data here. I'm talking about the contents of cookies, HTML5 local storage, IndexedDB, etc. To my knowledge, Firefox doesn't import that stuff from Chrome even on the desktop. Heck, Chrome and Safari don't even exchange da
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That's a very narrow interpretation of the rules. No one has ever equated web apps with the browser as their whole point was to not show the browser interface and not be part of the browser history in any way. The end user is never aware a browser is involved.
This is malicious compliance for a reason. The EU isn't going after webapps and Apple knows this.
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You've (conveniently) omitted their third point:
> There is no standard mechanism to tell a browser to render a page without displaying its UI (aka kiosk mode).
So OK, according to you the user is never aware that a browser is involved. Doesn't matter. Technically, a browser must be involved. Until recently, that was Safari. But now it can be something else.
Only, there's no standard way to tell random-browser-1234 to open full-screen without any GUI.
So, Apple has a choice:
1. Open all web apps full-screen i
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Or, maybe other browser makers in the EU can add code to their browsers to allow certain web apps or even websites to automatically open without the GUI. Web app developers would then be able to optimize their apps for those other browsers, which would allow web app makers to further push adoption of alternative browsers in addition to just users who use them for browsing alone.
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It's not like there is any other OS, or even a mobile OS, let's call it Android as an example, that has allowed to install PWAs from multiple browsers for years. If that was the case it would be embarrassing for Apple not finding a way to do it.
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"There is no standard mechanism to tell a browser to render a page without displaying its UI (aka kiosk mode)."
If only Apple could create a new standard for their OS.
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A proprietary one!
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When you say react you of couse mean react like a spoiled child; holding thier breath and stomping their feet
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Maybe the fines that can take significantly more revenue? Or the possibility that they could get prohibited from offering their App-store at all in the EU? Apple cannot win this one.
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