Comment by jaffathecake
9 years ago
Safari engineers have attended all service worker working group meetings, and they do contribute. However, I do share the frustrations over transparency.
It's tough to get developers to care about things like offline-first, because it's tough for them to convince managers to allow them to spend time on a feature that won't work on iOS (since it won't work in Safari, and Apple has banned other browser engines on their platform).
Ultimately it's users that lose out but also the web as a platform, as it pushes people, like the author of the article, towards walled-garden solutions like native apps.
Apple is looking for service worker use-cases, so if it's something you're interested in, let them know https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2017-July/0292....
This is not surprising of Apple. They've always been a walled garden, that's why I don't buy their products. I like to own products that give me full control as a user.
When the iPod came out, I never understood why I couldn't just drag the music files directly onto the device and I had to get iTunes and use iTune's tedious interface.
Now they have the app store; another unnecessary restriction. As a developer, it's nice to own an Android phone because I can just run whatever code I want on it and I don't need to buy any special licenses, hardware or proprietary SDKs to do that.
The "walled garden" is what prevents the horrendous disjointed mess that is the Android phone market. Sure, for a guy who likes hacking around stuff, it's fun for you. But for everyone else, there is a thousand different phones, with a thousand different interfaces, all running different versions of the Android OS, that will never be updated by the phone manufacturer.
I understand where you're coming from, I do. But when it comes to a phone, I greatly prefer the standardized hardware/interface/OS over the free for all. I hate to use the "it just works" nonsense, but that is exactly what it does.
Working in the Enterprise, the iPhone is infinitely easier for us to troubleshoot, and manage. Because everyone is running the same thing.
The walled garden is not what prevents having multiple manufacturers of phones. Apple could easily tear down their walled garden and let users install whatever software they want on their own phones - and they'd still be the only one manufacturing iPhones.
Your argument seems to indicate that you just like iPhones better. Otherwise, I think you would have said "I'd prefer that our company either standardize on one model of Android phone or the iPhone." because both would have the same effect - things would be easier to troubleshoot and manage since everyone would be running the same thing.
Anyway, currently as an iPhone user I think Apple comes up massively short on basic features. For instance - on an $800 phone they're missing a physical message-waiting indicator light! That's completely absurd to me. Some others: You can't have multiple users (and this is big for the Enterprise). You can't put app icons wherever you want, you have to stick them all together in one big pile on the screen. You can't see the time a text message came in until you perform a non-obvious gesture. You can't see anything useful in the call history list until you click an item. You can't even change the default browser!
It's no wonder to me why Enterprise customers don't standardize on the iPhone - they'd be giving up all control to Apple.
2 replies →
> The "walled garden" is what prevents the horrendous disjointed mess that is the Android phone market. Sure, for a guy who likes hacking around stuff, it's fun for you. But for everyone else, there is a thousand different phones, with a thousand different interfaces, all running different versions of the Android OS, that will never be updated by the phone manufacturer.
This is a non-sequitur. Fragmentation of Android OS versions isn't caused by Android letting you use web apps.
4 replies →
I just want to note that as a developer you can run any code you want on your iPhone through XCode for free. You just can't distribute it in the App Store without a license ($100 a year). You can distribute the code though, and users can compile and install it. This is how Kodi distributes on Apple platforms.
This is a newish change though, within the last couple of years.
You can run any code you want on your iPhone through XCode for free as long as you have a Mac, which is much more expensive than the app store license.
Many entitlements still require you to buy a certificate from Apple. You cannot, for example, compile and run your own VPN software.
3 replies →
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression you would then be required to reinstall each app every 7 days. In addition, I've read online claims that they limit you to something like 3 App IDs per week on a personal account.
Doesn't mean you have to reinstall all your apps every week?
It's especially ironic once you remember that iOS 1 didn't even have apps: Steve said everything would be done on websites that would give a native experience...
Apple knew this wasn't true. They knew there was an public native SDK on the roadmap because web technologies didn't cut it.
The Stocks and Weather app were originally HTML/CSS/JS apps just like Dashboard widgets (note Steve Jobs actually describing these apps on stage as 'widgets'), but the performance just wasn't there so they got reimplented using native apis.
That's only because he didn't see the opportunity and the ux. Not because he cared about freedom.
So how do you do playlists when you just drag files to folders? What if you wanted the same song in multiple playlists? How do you do smart playlist? All of this is not as popular now as it was during the iPods heyday but it was popular then.
iTunes' UI for creating playlists and letting me add and remove songs from the device by dragging and dropping the files could be perfectly compatible.
1 reply →
What is a M3U file
4 replies →
>When the iPod came out, I never understood why I couldn't just drag the music files directly onto the device and I had to get iTunes and use iTune's tedious interface.
Because MTP is utter rubbish.
Really, people complain about iTunes? It's never failed me as slow as it is. Try using MTP...
The iPod mounted as a perfectly-functional Firewire disk, yet you still had to use iTunes to put music on it for it to be playable on the device. (It was filed away in obfuscated filenames...)
USB sticks became popular more than a decade ago, and not once have I had one fail to copy or remove a file by dragging and dropping.
NO one said anything about MTP. Copying files > anything.
7 replies →
They're not looking as much as you think: https://twitter.com/othermaciej/status/885999233463009280
The overall vibes leaking from the Safari team on this matter have been arrogant, detached. I don't hold any hope.
>Apple has banned other browser engines on their platform.
Can you elaborate on this a bit? I primarily use Chrome as my browser on iOS. Is it really just running the Safari engine under the hood?
Yes. For this very reason, Mozilla was not porting Firefox to iOS for a very long time. Now, Firefox is also running iOS provided rendering engine.
Can you share more information about how the ban to other browsers works? Safari can do whatever they want but Apple banning competition is what hurts the web.