Comment by bloppe
5 days ago
Hobbling browser engines is a key pillar of app store control. Decent PWA support would be a massive blow to Apple's bottom line.
5 days ago
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.
> Is Chrome's PWA support on Android a massive glow to Android Play Store's bottom line?
Probably, but Android allows side-loading. iOS does not.
> What's iOS missing for PWA's to be a viable money-maker for companies?
Brace yourself.
1. Notifications are hobbled. This is HUGE. Silent pushes, rich notifications, NSE, reliable badge counts, and reliable delivery. This is made worse by:
2. Hobbled background priority. PWAs are aggressively suspended and killed. No long running processes. No guarantee of process execution. IndexedDB and in-memory state may be wiped at any time.
3. PWAs can’t access most system frameworks. Bluetooth (CoreBluetooth). NFC (Core NFC). Background location tracking. HealthKit. HomeKit. CallKit / VoIP. Siri Shortcuts / App Intents. AirDrop. Apple Pay (full API). CarPlay. System share extensions.
4. No access to native rendering pipelines. Performance is severely limited.
5. PWAs have unstable, purgeable memory. No persistent file storage.
6. Limited UX and lifecycle control. No termination callbacks. No suspend notifications. Reloaded arbitrarily. Back/forward gestures conflict with browser.
7. No access to native UI components like FaceID, native text fields, drag and drop across apps, context menus, and haptic feedback.
Apple has done everything they possibly can to ensure PWAs are broken on iOS.
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.
Firefox is really good now on android. It's my go to browser now for everything. It just needed full addon support but when that was finally there it was great.
This is true, however I think an App Store rule that to ship a browser engine, you have to be a browser, defined as having a browser that is maintained on MacOS, Linux, and/or Windows and which can be made the default browser on those platforms. Or even simpler, it has to present web browsing to the user as the primary function and not secondary to accessing content/shopping/gaming.
Seems either approach would rule out your Slack, Amazon app, etc. from shipping their own outdated 900MB Chromiums but allow Chrome, Firefox, K-Meleon, whatever.
a browser is essentially an app store with no 30% cut for Apple. If you can ship a browser, you don't need to pay the Apple tax
Has PWA become popular on unencumbered platforms like Android or Windows?
No.
Even if unencumbered on iOS, it will still fail, because PWA is an intrinsically confusing technology. The pitch to non-technical users is terrible. Just like passkeys, which has also been terrible.
4 replies →
Every app shipping its own Chromium isn't currently forbidden, as I understand it. They're just not allowed to use their own engines for webviews.
Technically you can even write your own webview, but you can't make it the default, nor will it be able to JIT-compile JS, since that requires an entitlement that Apple never grants. Having no JIT is murder on both performance and battery life.
https://www.macobserver.com/news/15-months-later-iphone-user...
>This is the conspiratorial version.
Everything that's inconvenient for your preferred narrative can just be dismissed as conspiratorial thinking, makes the world so much easier - doesnt it? I've compiled some of the evidences that makes clear how one of the Gatekeepers (Apple) has a tremendous conflict of interest, which manifested itself in systematic sabotaging of PWAs over the years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45534316