Comment by GaryBluto
5 days ago
I'm surprised Apple haven't thrown in the towel and opened things up worldwide yet. It's only a matter of time until it becomes too confusing and problematic to try and run the same system relatively openly in one country and walled in another.
> It's only a matter of time until it becomes too confusing and problematic to try and run the same system relatively openly in one country and walled in another
They will continue to do so for as long as it remains profitable. Navigating the complexities of multiple jurisdictions is the bread and butter of MNCs - it's the price of admission into the multinational club. Apple is guaranteed to have lawyers, admins, and executives already on the payroll for this task.
Or until they’ve successfully “demonstrated” that it always was impossible.
> Apple is guaranteed to have lawyers, admins, and executives already on the payroll for this task.
As both a shareholder and user, I really wish they’d invest their resources into feature development instead of manufacturing obstacles.
Lawyers, admins, and executives, sure. But what about the complexity on the engineers who now have to maintain an exploding matrix of modes? I can definitely see that becoming burdensome.
much has been written about the deteriorating quality of iOS.
There's bluntly not strong external evidence that software quality is a driving priority at Apple in recent years, so it most probably follows that concerns about maintainability aren't either.
You’re not wrong, it is burdensome but the sheer volume of money they secure primarily because of their license to rent-seek mercilessly (in the US especially because it’s the market they dominate most and with the weakest regulators) makes even a hilarious amount of complexity supportable. Besides, it’s mainly the users who suffer from the codebase falling apart, not Apple decision makers.
$500k+ TC makes many burdens worth shouldering
they make $1b in revenue and $300mm a day in profit
Engineers say they want to work on hard problems then complain that they can’t solve something because it’s too complex
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sounds like a problem for claude to worry about
And since billions of dollars are on the line it will remain profitable for a long time.
I've always thought the same. Obviously there isn't much of a technical hurdle since they have the engineering talent. But, keeping track of all these cross-region rules and training your staff+customers on it has to be quite costly in multiple respects (time, energy, mental models, etc.)
My personal opinion is that keeping the browser engine locked down isn't much of a profit generator, unlike maintaining full reign over the app store would be.
Hobbling browser engines is a key pillar of app store control. Decent PWA support would be a massive blow to Apple's bottom line.
Is Chrome's PWA support on Android a massive glow to Android Play Store's bottom line?
I don't buy this line, that Safari is intentionally hobbled to prop up the App Store. What's iOS missing for PWA's to be a viable money-maker for companies? Surely there so much money on the line that we would see companies using them. What does Match.com's portfolio of dating apps need to be viable as websites instead?
In reality, when you actually pay attention to Apple's software engineering practices you realise how incredibly cheap and stingy they are. All the apps are so under funded and under developed. Bugs are introduced all over their native platforms all the time and never fixed.
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It's not just that, Apple also gets $20+ billion per year in AdSense revenue from Google for being the default search engine in Safari. A change of even 10% marketshare would cost them billions, and this money is pure profit.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/14/google-pays-apple-36percent-...
This is the conspiratorial version.
The more likely explanation is that when every app can bundle their own browser engine, we will not see a competition explosion. Instead, Electron apps will come to mobile, with every app shipping its own browser stack.
You can’t tell me Gecko, which has already failed on desktop, will suddenly be popular on mobile. You can easily tell me every app shipping their own Chromium would be very popular with developers.
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Good. The sooner I can run Firefox with the legit uBlock origin the better.
While its not Firefox, you can run uBlock origin with the Orion browser from the Kagi people.
That’s what I’m currently doing - it’s barely functional. I’m sure it’ll get there eventually but it misses a ton of stuff the desktop version blocks.
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Okay now that we have come to the topic, How is Orion browser on App store whereas all others aren't?
is there a way to make more innovation in this area and maybe an extension or two developed adding more perms etc or forking Orion or the know-how behind it and replicating it could finally allow PWA on apple iphones?
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Apple is intentionally trying to make it frustrating in hopes that people will complain to relevant voices that “there’s too much regulation and you should just let Apple do its thing” which is something they've been pushing a lot in Europe the past few years for example
FeatureToggles.swift
eligibilityd
https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Eligibility
This. It’s computation. Computation doesn’t really “get” geopolitical borders.
I’m so sick of the ever increasing variances between the different “store” offerings in different regions of the world. Seems like every time I push an update (every month or so), I have to answer updated questions and declarations, often relative to different parts of the world.
This is a poorly thought through argument, as there is nothing that “gets” geopolitical borders.
I don’t think you understand Apple‘s stubbornness. They DO NOT like being told what to do.
They seem to have gotten a long way better with Japan in this process than the EU, but they’re still not happy about it. So they’re absolutely not gonna just roll over for everyone.