The tech press continues to miss the biggest iOS anti-trust thrust: browsers. The press, that is, with the exception of The Register:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/24/apple_eu_browser_defaults/
Why is this the biggest salient? Because browser choice can *end* App Stores. Thoroughly and totally. And that's why Apple continues to fight real choice so damned hard. They're pulling out every stop -- including funding astroturf groups -- and risking every possible fine to keep true choice from emerging through a mechanism they don't control.
Small reversals like this are helpful, but Apple has continues to geofence and degrade the potential of real browser choice. And that's a scandal
The idea of an open, capable, interoperable platform that delivers high-functioning apps is *such* a threat that Apple is trying to undermine the web's potential from every single one of those angles. It's working in standards and quasi-standards bodies to keep the web less capable, using blocking position on iOS to prevent breakout of a capable web, and talking down the benefits of interoperability.
Glactic-scale gaslighting to protect profits, not users.
The geofencing and legal angles aren't easy to parse, but here's the status quo. Apple:
- Delivered an SDK that doesn't work on developer phones outside the EU
- Proposed legal terms that are *bonkers*
- Doesn't use the same APIs for their own browser
- Is refusing to provide APIs to support PWAs and PWA capabilities
- Won't let anyone ship a real browser outside the EU, even if all of that was acceptable. Which it isn't.
These are defense lines. To defend what? The App Store.
And it's just worth remembering how far behind the web on iOS is.
Android users have WebGPU *today*. And View Transitions. And the navigation API. And scroll-linked animations. And content-visibility. And Custom Paint. And Web Transport. And Web HID, Web USB, Web Bluetooth, Web NFC, Web MIDI, and Trusted Types.
Not to mention functional Web Push:
https://webventures.rejh.nl/blog/2024/web-push-ios-one-year/
@slightlyoff have you seen me program an FPGA with Web USB from my phone?
@whitequark @slightlyoff feel free to ignore this, but all this is because of the lack of a POSIX+ across smartphones. That is a business decision corporates have made repeatedly. They own the Web too.
@tetrislife @slightlyoff I like Wasm a lot more than I like POSIX (one of the worst APIs in existence), so you won't see me cry for the latter