As a user, I don’t really get the argument of either side.
Apple’s killing WPAs because they can’t allow 3rd party web engines to do that… That doesn’t make sense to me because Apple is still going to allow these browsers to open these WPAs as normal websites anyway.
Now, how is it an attack to the openness of the web, though? Maybe these websites lose convenient access to users? But what do the users lose here? Especially given that they can distribute their apps through third party app stores. I don’t really understand the problem.
I think they fear someone will make a browser that makes native apps less desirable.
Google could wrap all the iOS widget, expose them to WASM and basically let people bypass the AppStore entirely and install everything as Chrome “apps”.
Safari conveniently lacks a lot of the features that would compete with native apps in features, like refusing to implement WebPush until very recently.
They don’t want web apps to even have a chance to compete with their AppStore. With Safari being the only allowed browser, they could make sure the browser is always less desirable than downloading the app.
But they are going to allow 3rd party app stores in EU, right? Then those chrome-based web apps wouldn’t be a bigger threat. Maybe I’m missing something.
“Kill the Open Internet” by… allowing people to choose a non-Safari browser to run PWAs…?
What?
The whining about getting cut off from push notifications, looks like a particularly funny one in light of this: (25 Jan 2024)
Privacy Concerns about Apple Push Notifications
TL;DR: data-hungry apps use push notifications as a trigger to send app analytics and device information to their remote servers, even if the apps aren’t running at all on your iPhone. Such apps include TikTok, Facebook, FB Messenger, Instagram, Threads, X, and many more.
News doesn’t become rage bait just because it is against your beloved Apple. The video does discuss very relevant points about how abusive this move from Apple is. In fact, this news has been discussed seriously for two weeks now.
Firefox does that too
Firefox is just a browser and has nothing to do with PWAs that require OS support. This is about PWAs as an alternative to app side loading, which Apple doesn’t allow. You’re needlessly misconstruing the issue.
Those behave like independent apps, they have their own icon, their own entry in the app switcher, they’re full screen with no browser UI elements. Just a full screen web page. This has been possible for a long time on iOS too with Safari.
It has nothing to do with sideloading. PWAs were a way to make web apps feel as close as possible to real apps as possible. Things like vger.app feels almost like native apps.
Apple’s decided they’d rather get rid of it than let third party browsers be able to do that, as they can’t control how much those apps can do. Chrome can just make WASM really good and make native apps less necessary, and make the AppStore tax more avoidable, and they won’t let that happen.
And Firefox does indeed also kinda suck in the PWA department, and have kind of soft-abandonned them, and they’re buggy. On Chrome, a good PWA can feel as good as native.
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