Comment by rorylawless
5 days ago
My hope for laws such as the ones Japan and the EU enacted was that companies would see the writing on the wall and change their practices worldwide, if only for cost reasons (it presumably being more expensive to maintain multiple sets of rules.) However, these companies are now so large that they can choose to absorb any inefficiencies on a country-by-country basis.
At a hardware level it seemed to work. Looking at USB-C on iPhones for example.
Software wise? Fail. EEA gets to disable start search in Windows 11. RoW does not. Interestingly EEA membership is decided at install time based on your selection, and is not changeable afterwards.
iPhones on the other hand have a daemon running that checks your location. It's not based on where you set up the phone. So traveling from Europe to somewhere else can actually prevent you from updating apps that you got via an alt-store:
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/03/06/alternative-ios-app-sto...
Yea, unfortunately with software, using enough granular feature flags, they can make their software "maximally bad" for each given region. They lose a battle in the EU and are forced to make the software better? They will make it better only in the EU. Lose another one in Japan over a different issue? Just make a "japan" flag and only make it narrowly better for that use case in that region. Lose further battles in other regions, just add more flags.
They will never deploy the "better" feature worldwide if they have the opportunity to limit the better code to a particular region.
1: And of course, by "better" I am always referring to "better for the user" not "better for Apple."
Even in a hardware level, this is easily obtainable, and Apple already does it.
Chinese iPhones? They have 2 physical SIM card slots and no eSIM.
EU iPhones? 1 SIM card slot, and 1 eSIM.
US iPhones? 2 eSIM card slots and no physical SIM. US iPhones also have mmWave when other countries do not.
If Apple wanted to, keeping a Lightning US iPhone was easily on the cards. The EU’s role in forcing the issue in the US is exaggerated.
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1) Apple loves USB-C, they helped invent it and were one of the first to ship a USB-C only laptop
2) Apple committed to 10 years of lightning support to weather the backlash from dropping 30-pin
USB-C on iPhone was going to happen regardless of the EU.
> 1) Apple loves USB-C Sure, that's why they refused to adopt it for almost a decade after it became the standard and fought the EU regulation tooth-and-nail.
iPhone getting USB-C was inevitable. I mean, their iPads were USB-C for years before any EU law.
The best the EU can say is that the law moved up the inevitable a year or two.
Sounds like a market for Faraday GPS spoofer boxes.
We still playing Pokémon go?
And what's your opinion if the law would oblige the companies to remove features their products have like tracking transparency popups? Two countries' courts already fined Apple for enforcing a popup that warns users about tracking across third party apps (a feature Apple themselves do not use)?
My prior POV was that Apple would jettison the feature globally, but the discussion elsewhere in this thread suggests that salami slicing at the software-level is a cost larger companies are willing to bear.
There are many things Apple does that have anticompetitive motivations, but the browser engine doesn't seem like one of them. It's genuinely about security and battery life and standardization. So if cost was never the reason in the first place, cost is not going to be the reason to change.
It is literally done for strategic reasons to put a stranglehold on innovations on the web, so that there is no risk of web app technology developing to a point to threaten the dominance of native apps and the app store.
Anybody that thinks otherwise is hopeless naive, Steve Jobs himself envisioned a web app future as the future of technology; before Apple found out the gold mine that the app store became.
> to put a stranglehold on innovations on the web
I think that's the hypothetical part, it's not reality. Safari continues to be a fully modern browser. It doesn't release new features quite as fast as Chrome, but it does generally adopt them.
If Apple were attempting to put a "stranglehold on innovations on the web", Safari's feature set would look very different. But that's not what's happening.
Like I said, Apple does lots of anticompetitive things. I'm not blind to what they do with the app store. I just don't think that the single browser engine policy is motivated by this, or has much effect on it, given how Apple does keep maintaining Safari as a modern browser.
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I'm not putting cynical motivations past Apple, but you're reading too much (or too little?) into what Jobs said at the time.
His remarks at the time of the initial iPhone release (with the benefit of hindsight) were clearly because they weren't ready to expose any sort of native API's.
Pissing on you and telling you it's raining was typical Jobs reality distortion field marketing, and not an indication that he actually believed it was raining.
> Anybody that thinks otherwise is hopeless naive
This is inappropriate. People can reasonably disagree without being insulting to each other.
If you have concrete evidence that Apple is deliberately withholding some essential advancement in Safari or its support for Web standards so that it can sell more apps, by all means, cite it.
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If browser F is worse at battery life than browser S, people will figure that out and adapt for themselves. If it's a big difference, it's self-evident; and small differences should show up in the battery life tool and computer press.
Security-wise, the sandbox should limit damage to within the browser, and if it doesn't that's not the browser's fault. Maybe restrict access to password filling and such though / figure out how to offer an API to reduce the impact.
Standardization, eh? Forcing Safari on iOS and not making it available on the mass market platforms (Android and Windows) makes it a pretty wonky standard. I guess there's a claim to be made for the embedded browsing engine, but IMHO, that should be an app developer choice.
> If browser F is worse at battery life than browser S, people will figure that out and adapt for themselves.
Unfortunately, the makers of a certain browser also control several major web properties, and regularly make 'mistakes' that break compatibility with competing browsers, while releasing a set of apps that 'forget' users' browser selections on a monthly basis.
Personally, I'd much prefer apple allowed a browser engine with proper ad blocking support. But I do worry that the moment they do so, the almost-monopoly browser market would become a total monopoly.
Safari exclusivity is the only reason we aren’t living in a 100% “this site built for chrome” world. I think folks must forget the IE days and how bad that was.
There is zero percent chance developers are wasting a second making sure their sites actually work cross platform if not for iOS (and iOS more moneyed user base).
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Safari has long been better for battery than Chrome but people still install Chrome on their MacBooks.
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> people will figure that out and adapt for themselves
No they won't. People on HN will. Not the average person.
> Security-wise, the sandbox should limit damage to within the browser
The problem is, arbitrary code execution vastly expands the risks. Your "should" is doing all the work there.
> Standardization, eh? Forcing Safari on iOS and not making it available on the mass market platforms
Huh? Apple follows web standards. Why the heck should it make Safari available on Android and Windows? Safari isn't a standard, web standards are.
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The web browser is the singular hole in Apple's grip over the user's device. While there are definitely arguments that can be made about security, I think it's naive to think that Apple is unaware of this and is operating on something other than protecting their app store fortune.
why wouldnt they just drop safari and switch to firefox with ublock origin included in that case?
adtech is the big security and performance drain and allowing ads and making them hard to block is a big security and performance gap