That being said, I am not sure why I would actually want most of these features in the browser? Many of these things feel like they further complicate what a browser is supposed to be doing and opens up security concerns at the same time.
I think the idea of using a web app for many tasks instead of apps is fine, but I don't think the idea that a web app can do everything is the way to go.
Edit: To be clear about the Firefox comment, notice that many of the features that are not supported non chromium browsers don't support on any platform. So the question on whether these are considered web standards is outside of whether iOS allows other engines.
Edit again: Apparently the third column is based on your current browser instead of always comparing chrome, mobile safari, and firefox like I assumed. I am currently on Firefox on Windows, and there are more red X's under Firefox for me. Seems like a weird choice to not always compare all major browsers.
On iOS, you’re either doing a native app, sharing 30% of your income with Apple, or you’re restricted to Safari’s feature set. No browser in iOS can use anything but WebKit
Going through some of the list from the top:
* Shortcuts in the manifest: This seems to be standard. Would be nice if mobile Safari supported it.
* Protocol Handling: This is non-standard.
* File Handling: MDN doesn't contain a reference to a standard, and it has this caveat: "At present this feature is only available on Chromium-based browsers, and only on desktop operating systems". So not only does it seem to be non-standard; Chrome on Android doesn't even support it!
* Contact Picker: This seems to be moving through the standardization process and is not yet standardized, if I understand MDN's "experimental" label correctly.
* Face Detection: This seems to be yet another not-yet-standard API.
* Vibration: This is standard, it's a shame Safari doesn't implement it.
I'll stop here but you get the point. 2/6 are actual standards; 4/6 are just features Chromium implemented even though they aren't standard.
I'm glad mobile Safari doesn't follow every Google whim. Google has enough power over the standardization process as it is; we don't want them to control which features browsers add outside of the standard too.
In addition, parts of the list seems to be extremely outdated: Safari on iOS does support the Web Push API and most of the Notifications API (at least for apps added to your home screen as PWAs). These APIs have been supported since iOS 16.4, according to MDN.
You missed the point completely.
Apple >forbids< any browser engine on iOS other than their own Safari. So you can't just install Chrome on iOS, because when you do you get Safari instead.
I would not care how Apple cripples their own web browser if they didn't force other browsers on iOS to use their browser engine. They are forcing me to write a native app instead of just tell my customers to install Chrome to have access to the APIs my product needs (web bluetooth).
I am not an iOS app developer, I'm a web developer. I don't have the resources to support that kind of code when I already have a perfectly working web app on the competing platform. I also do not plan to sell anything through my webapp, which is why Apple wants to force developers to create a native app, where they can collect 30% (or whatever % it is now) of anything sold through the app.
It doesn't matter what the standards are or aren't. Apple are just being greedy assholes and what they are doing is absolutely worse than what Microsoft did to get sued in an antitrust case when they simply bundled IE in Windows.
And to make it worse, Apple is on the board that decides what standards get into W3C, so they are blocking useful APIs based on their own greed.
This is part of the reason Apple is currently being sued by the DOJ
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline
Anyway, if you want to exclusively argue "Users should be able to install the browser they want", that's fine. But you're not; both your comment and the pwa.gripe page brings up how Apple is "crippling" their own web browser. Since you use the same wording as pwa.gripe, I assume you too view the lack of non-standard Google-only features as "crippling mobile Safari". I disagree.
"Apple Is Not Defending Browser Engine Choice"
https://infrequently.org/2022/06/apple-is-not-defending-brow...
I think Chromium out-competing every other browser engine is a bad thing.
Hmm. I believe that Apple can compete with Google if they want to. They have the money, they have the marketing chops, they have the incentive ($20B search engine deal) and they are the default browser.
(also, they have trained iOS users that Safari is the only default browser on iOS for 14 yrs by not allowing other browsers to be set as the default)
All Apple has to do is actually compete, not just rely on their monopoly.
I mean, keeping one monopoly at bay (Chromium) with the other (WebKit requirement) isn't really how this is supposed to work, right?
I don't think that would happen. I don't have much faith in Apple's abilities in this area, and their incentives are structured such that the less viable web apps are as a replacement to native apps, the more money they get from their 30% cut.
Again, your arguments would make sense if my opinion was: "good guy Apple valiantly defends the open web from Google out of the goodness of their hearts". But that isn't my argument. I don't care whether Apple could compete with Google if they tried. I care whether Apple would compete with Google, and they wouldn't.
> I mean, keeping one monopoly at bay (Chromium) with the other (WebKit requirement) isn't really how this is supposed to work, right?
WebKit isn't a browser monopoly, it has less than 20% of the browser market share. That 20% share is big enough to push web developers towards making websites work in browsers other than Chromium, but it's not big enough that there's a danger of web developers thinking, "everyone uses WebKit anyway so we won't bother testing on anything else".
Sure, it's a monopoly on iOS, but I don't see how this is relevant to my argument. The web is more important to me than iOS is.
They receive $20B a year from Google (search engine deal). Some estimates put WebKit/Safari's budget at $500M. That's a rounding error away from $20B of pure profits. I completely agree that Apple is not in it for the good of the web. They are in it for $20B a year.
And even if they wouldn't want to compete: fine. Let them give up. Make room for browsers that do want to compete (or at least, let them try).
> WebKit isn't a browser monopoly, it has less than 20% of the browser market share.
That monopoly on iOS is enough, though. The web has to work on iOS because the wealthiest users have an iPhone, and all they have is WebKit. I work at a place where most of our users are on mobile, and most of them are on iOS. So WebKit sets the bar for what we can do. In other words, Apple is in full control of what we are able to do. Building features for Android users is often not worth our time and money, so we just don't build it.
Again, this leads to Chromium out-competing everything else and getting as entrenched in mobile as it already is in desktop. This is a bad outcome.
> I work at a place where most of our users are on mobile, and most of them are on iOS. So WebKit sets the bar for what we can do.
In other words, Apple has successfully prevented you from writing a web application which only works in Chromium. This is a good outcome.
... by abusing their monopoly position on iOS (instead of competing).
Good outcome?
Also the constant crashing when using canvas and the web audio api, it’s a disaster to be honest and it feels intentional, like they want me to write an app instead so they can rent seek.
https://webventures.rejh.nl/blog/2024/history-of-safari-show...
Why don’t you encourage them to get an Android? What makes you think that people who prefer an iOS device over Android would even install Chrome after you nag them with dark patterns?
> I also do not plan to sell anything through my webapp, which is why Apple wants to force developers to create a native app, where they can collect 30% (or whatever % it is now) of anything sold through the app.
Sorry, not following you: Apple is forcing you to give them 30% of nothing? How exactly is that a problem?
> Apple are just being greedy assholes and what they are doing is absolutely worse than what Microsoft did to get sued in an antitrust case when they simply bundled IE in Windows.
Yes, how dare Apple look after their [checks notes] customers by preventing devs from using the features that would most annoy their customers?!? Such a greedy thing for a company to do, to give customers what they want! The only true purpose of a company ought to make it easy to slurp up customer data and monetize eyeballs!
100% guaranteed people would. I know this for a fact. You somehow have proof of the negative for some reason. Maybe you can share that.
Regardless, just because you are satisfied with iOS as a platform doesn't mean others don't continue to wish for improvements.
Can I ask which version of iOS was perfect in our mind?
Since Webkit has been the only engine allowed on iOS, ultimately this is a disagreement on app distribution. I can see Apple and Mozilla's argument regarding Web NFC, but I also don't want to write a whole app so my friends and I can play around with NFC tags. I find it irresistible to draw comparisons to the new Android situation regarding non-Play Store apps. If there was a developer registration list for websites (that was better than DNS registrar records and TLS certificates), would Apple and Mozilla find that acceptable? After all, I need to give my real name and payment details to Apple just to write an app.
But for good measure I will add one for Mozilla too. Firefox Android still doesn't support the Web Codecs API [1], so I need to use the "jpeg" codec on Selkies remote desktop sites, which I assume is rather poor for my bandwidth and battery.
[0] https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/238 [1] https://caniuse.com/webcodecs
The page is about PWAs, applications that can be installed by the browser rather than the platform's App Store. Native applications already have those capabilities and a lot more.
Safari is in a very special position because it controls what the web can do on iOS (all browsers on iOS have to use Apple's WebKit engine, they can't add web features). Apple is not just gatekeeping native (through the app store), but its competition, too (the open web, through the webkit requirement)
Sonehow you seem to confuse open web with Chrome-only non-standard APIs
Yes, yes they can. They don't get to call it standard or essential. And Chrome-shilling sites like the pwa.gripe and a slew of others don't get to call those features "essential standards of the web".
> No single company in control.
That is literally not how standards work in the browser world by literal agreement of all browser vendors.
We literally lived through this with IE pushing its own non-standard features and calling it a day. Hence the whole "let's reach a consensus, and have several independent implementations of a feature before calling it a standard".
And if "no single company is in control", why then you're so enthusiastically pushing for a Google's full control of the web?
A web app could ask you to use a different browser (not ideal, but if the web app requires a specific API, it's not an unreasonable).
Safari is in a very special position because it controls what the web can do on iOS (all browsers on iOS have to use Apple's WebKit engine, they can't add web features). Apple is not just gatekeeping native (through the app store), but its competition, too (the open web, through the webkit requirement)
The very important part about this is whether or not these features are actually considered a web standard or is it Google pushing their own agenda.
Which is where whether or not any non chromium browser supports any of these on any platform. Which many of these features they don't.
That completely changes the conversation here, from Apple purposefully ignoring standards to Google pushing things that are not standards yet. Which I will admit that the reality is a bit of both here, but it should not be considered a negative when a browser does not support a feature that is non standard... we heavily criticized IE for exactly this and yet we celebrate Chrome for it?
Apple is on the W3C board that gets to decide what APIs become standards, so Apple is definitely pushing their own agenda on the W3C.
So you can't really complain that Google is pushing their own agenda with these APIs when Apple is the one refusing to make them a standard. In this case, Apple is the one doing shady shit by holding back things like web bluetooth for no good reason. No, "security" is not a reason, this API has been in use on other platforms for a very long time with no real security issues.
There are lots of other standard APIs that have been implemented, but Apple refused to let the ones that eat into their app store go forward.
>we heavily criticized IE for exactly this and yet we celebrate Chrome for it?
I remember when IE implemented XMLHTTPRequest, and it did a lot of good for the web.
I also remember when Microsoft got an antitrust case for simply bundling IE with Windows, yet Apple seems to get a pass for forbidding all other browser engines on iOS? Well, fortunately Apple has its own antitrust case in the DOJ now for its own abusive business tactics.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline
We really need to stop putting google on a pedestal as if they are truelly on the side of an open web, like every company they are looking out for their own interests. Which is fine, they are allowed to do this.
That doesn't change that many of these are in fact not a standard according to W3C and should not be implemented in any browser until it is. A discussion about why it may not be standard is worth it, but that is also a very important distinction that is not made on this page. Right now it is framing it as google supports a standard that the other's (including Firefox) do not.
Just because Google does something it doesn't mean the rest of the industry should follow. If we did that in IE days we would still have ActiveX
That's not exactly how standards work. A browser (or anyone) comes up with a spec, a browser can ship it (to test the waters in an origin-trial, to gain traction if they believe in it), and the standard (often) comes after the fact:
"Working Groups don't gate what browsers ship, nor do they define what's useful or worthy. [...] In practice, they are thoughtful historians of recent design expeditions, critiquing, tweaking, then spreading the good news of proposals that already work through Web Standards ratified years after features first ship, serving to licence designs liberally to increase their spread."
https://infrequently.org/2025/09/standards-and-the-fall-of-i...
1. Google often doesn't bother even with a spec. Or it creates a semblance of a spec, throws it up on a googler's Github account, ships it and advertises it as "emergin standard" on web.dev
I mean, the status of many (if not most) of the APIs that these sites push are literally "napkin scribble, not on any standards track".
2. Google pushes a lot of APIs quickly into production even if there's a very explicit open objection from other browser vendors (any objections are routinely ignored: from general objections to the shape of APIs to whether it can even be implemented outside Chrome).
3. I wouldn't really quote Alex Russel on anything related to standards, as he is responsible (directly or indirectly) for quite a few of those because of his work on Web Components. E.g. Constructable Stylesheets were shipped in Chrome because Google's own lit project needed them. They shipped it in production when the design contained a trivially triggered race condition, it was called out, and Google completely ignored it because "users want it" or something.
4. Browser vendors quite literally agreed not push incompatible only-exists-in-one-browser shit after the browser wars. The whole standards process is designed to minimize this. Well, Chrome is the dominant browser, so of course they shit all over the process, and quite a few people cheer them for that.
Internet Explorer in the 2000s: shits out a bunch of own non-standard crap, people boo them
Chrome in the 2010s-2020s: shits out a bunch of own non-standard crap, people cheer and blame other browsers for not implementing this crap because... Google is "the champion of open web" or some such bullshit.
2. That's just your skewed take.
3. So what, bugs can be fixed. It's nowhere near as abusive as what Apple does with iOS Safari.
4. You think the "browser wars" are over? Apple's actions clearly indicate the war is on, and they've selected the nuclear option of forbidding any other browser on their platform.
>Internet Explorer in the 2000s: shits out a bunch of own non-standard crap, people boo them
Did people "boo" XMLHTTPRequest? Because it actually revolutionized the web, and people cheered it.
I'm sorry, but that doesn't seem to be right. They have a process: https://www.chromium.org/blink/launching-features/
> I wouldn't really quote Alex Russel on anything related to standards
I disagree :)
...but it's getting late here, have to shut down :)
How is Web Bluetooth an evil agenda of Google??
It's making web browsers more capable. It's not some evil conspiracy to enrich Google. If Apple wants to let the W3C move forward in making it a standard, then all browsers would benefit, and all users that would like to use a bluetooth enabled web-app would benefit.
The only one that benefits from not allowing it to become a standard is Apple, because they get to force developers to make a native app, where Apple can extract a % of sales through the app.
>Just because Google does something it doesn't mean the rest of the industry should follow. If we did that in IE days we would still have ActiveX
IE was the first to implement XMLHTTPRequest. It changed the web fundamentally, and was the basis for "web 2.0". Everyone was glad that they created it, standards or not when it was first implemented.
If we didn't have browser manufacturers pushing the limits, we'd be stuck with "web 1.0" and browsers that did nothing interesting outside of loading animated gifs of dancing babyies.
I use both Apple and Android ecosystems, so I’ll occasionally participate in normal user conversations about features, how-tos, etc. Posting anything about the Android ecosystem, unless I was talking about Samsung features I disliked using, is no more or less likely to get down/upvoted than anything else I post about any other technology. Using any tone more positive than a negative-leaning neutral when referring to any Apple product reliably collects a handful of downvotes, and often a negative comment or two. Same thing with negative sentiment and upvotes. I’ve never seen such a passionate dislike of a corporation among a small number of people. Even with famous brand loyalty rivalries like Ford/Chevy in the 80s and 90s it was more mutual. It wasn’t like 99% of drivers not giving a shit, .5% of Ford users being smug, and 2% of GMC drivers just being super mad at a product they don’t own.
I’ve never found myself in any online community that meets that description. Certainly not HN, and HN hardly seems big enough to have Apple fanboy niches that you could accidentally find yourself in.
In the heyday of Steve Jobs’ Apple there was certainly a lot of praise here, but also constant prominent complaints about Apple being overpriced, or not open enough, or too litigious, or having too many fanboys.
I’ve seen way more complaints about Apple fanboyism than actual fanboyism. I’m genuinely curious how you could find yourself in one of those communities by accident.
I think it’s a combination of underdog vibes and confirmation bias that people have adopted as a community identity.
Firefox refusing to implement a web standard: APPROPRIATE
Safari refusing to implement a web standard: INAPPROPRIATE
If you answered Firefox, you are WRONG.
You get Safari, because Apple forces all browsers on iOS to use their own crippled browser engine.
Apple also is part of the W3C board that gets to decide which APIs get to become standards, so they also influence what other browser makers do.
This would be a non-issue if Apple didn't force all browsers on iOS to use their Safari engine.
There is much more to a web browser than just its rendering engine. When you install Firefox on iOS, you get Firefox. It uses the WebKit rendering engine, but it’s still the Firefox browser.
To be frank, it’s pretty insulting and dismissive to all the people putting huge amounts of work into building browsers only to for you go around telling people that all their work is really just a mirage.
It’s hard to delineate which of these are Chrome features or actual web standards. And it’s therefore hard to blame either Safari or Firefox for not supporting them if they’re not standardized yet.
I'm happy that Firefox doesn't expose Bluetooth, NFC or similar stuff to websites: the browser is huge enough without needing to mediate even more access to local hardware.
It's unclear how some of these would even work for other Browser. E.g.: contacts. What data source would you use? I keep my contacts as vcard files in ~/contacts, but other folks might use a remove CalDAV server, a web-based GUI, or data stored in SQL which can be read by some other native client (I think KDE does this).
> We believe Web NFC poses risks to users security and privacy because of the wide range of functionality of the existing NFC devices on which it would be supported, because there is no system for ensuring that private information is not accidentally exposed other than relying on user consent, and because of the difficulty of meaningfully asking the user for permission to share or write data when the browser cannot explain to the user what is being shared or written.
— https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#web-nfc
And here’s what they have to say about Web Bluetooth:
> This API provides access to the Generic Attribute Profile (GATT) of Bluetooth, which is not the lowest level of access that the specifications allow, but its generic nature makes it impossible to clearly evaluate. Like WebUSB there is significant uncertainty regarding how well prepared devices are to receive requests from arbitrary sites. The generic nature of the API means that this risk is difficult to manage. The Web Bluetooth CG has opted to only rely on user consent, which we believe is not sufficient protection. This proposal also uses a blocklist, which will require constant and active maintenance so that vulnerable devices aren't exploited. This model is unsustainable and presents a significant risk to users and their devices.
— https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#web-bluetooth
The fact is that Google wrote these specifications, couldn’t convince any other rendering engine to implement them, and somehow it’s Apple’s fault the rest of the world rejected their idea.
These are not web standards, they are Blink-only APIs that Google decided to build unilaterally. The web is not defined by whatever Google wants. Web standards are supposed to be arrived at through consensus, and the consensus is that these things should not be part of the web.
Apple is on the W3C board that gets to decide which APIs become standards. They are preventing these APIs from becoming standards. They have an interest to forbid Web Bluetooth and NFC from becoming standards, because they profit heavily from native apps on their iOS platform, where they collect a percentage of all sales made through apps, so they want to force developers to create native apps instead of web apps.
I'll also point out that Opera, Edge, Samsung and others did implement the Web Bluetooth API, so you are wrong about your assertion that they "couldn't convince any other rendering engine to implement them".
https://caniuse.com/web-bluetooth
If you don't think Apple is abusing their power here, then you are either lacking understanding of how Apple operates, or you just love Apple a little too much.
They are not. You have this almost entirely backwards. To become a standard, you only need two independent interoperable implementations. This means Apple cannot block something from becoming a standard. The only thing Google needs to do is convince anybody else to implement their proposals. So far they have managed to convince precisely zero other rendering engines to do so.
> I'll also point out that Opera, Edge, Samsung and others did implement the Web Bluetooth API, so you are wrong about your assertion that they "couldn't convince any other rendering engine to implement them".
All of these are Chromium / Blink users, not independent implementations.
Maybe you don't realize that Apple is on the W3C board that gets to decide which APIs become standards, so they can squash any API that they think could cut into their app store. Citing Firefox as some kind of evidence doesn't take into account the abusive business tactics that Apple uses to force developers to create native apps on their platform.
I don't care about Firefox does, because they aren't forbidding an entire platform from using any browser engine except their own browser engine, which Apple does with Safari on iOS.
So Apple controls iOS browser engines, and they also control which APIs get to become standards. This is plainly abusive. It's also part of the reason Apple is being sued by the DOJ
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline
* Vibration
* Background Sync
* Bluetooth
* NFC
* Notifications
* Web Push
A feature more devs should use- I've been surprised how much websites behave like native apps if you just "add to homescreen" instead of downloading an official app, e.g. twitter, instagram.
When you open the shortcut, it doesn't launch as a tab in safari, but appears independently in the app switcher. They are often indistinguishable from official apps!
Seems like a great way for devs to avoid app store pains
Things that should be removed, according to me:
* Audio recording
* Geolocation
* Motion
* Media capture
I can think of several light weight patch editors I’d like be able to use. There’s probably not enough demand for someone to make a stand alone app for them.
I can’t see any reason why this needs to be controlled by apple’s app store.
But why not Bluetooth or NFC? I can’t imagine any way those could be annoyances, or even why websites would want them outside of some extremely specialized applications.
Similarly, if my bank website could do NFC tap-to-pay securely, that would be pretty cool. I can imagine lots of interesting opt-in uses for NFC in a webapp.
Arguments that these features are held back by Apple specifically in order to keep apps on the app store where they can control things and take 30% at least hold water, I think, even if that reasoning doesn't apply to Mozilla rejecting features.
I suspect like many here, at $work we use a shit-ton of Flexoptix SFPs.
Flexoptix are not a $megacorp, they are a (very) small German company.
They manage to ship cross-platform apps to flash the SFPs. So its really not that difficult.
I would think a web app would be more of a pain the the butt to maintain because you have to deal with CSS reactive UI etc.
An enormous amount of the cost of developing a lot of native apps is customizing the appearance and behavior, to match some slide deck mockup or to make it “on-brand” or whatever. It’s better for the user, and way cheaper, if you just… don’t do that. Hell a lot of common UI elements are easier in native than web if you just don’t try to customize them a ton (data-backed tables and list views and such are sooooo nice)
I like to use Apple products for things that are commodities to me because I am not gonna look into the details of those and when I do Apple reasoning often make sense to me (just like this list).
There is a lot more we can criticize about these big tech corps (including Apple) than a product decision for a company that is known for making polarizing decisions on behalf of their customers. If people buy it... they must like it, no?
This of all web pages ought to be easy to read on an iPhone screen, but the way it's constructed prevents it. You can't zoom the whole page out to see the entire table width because the table is in a scrolling frame and wider than its box. You can only scroll the nested frame sideways to see how row labels relate to iPhone cells. If you give up and use landscape, it still scrolls vertically in its frame. You have to aim for the margin or else you'll scroll just an inch and be halted because you caught the table.
Because it's critical that the web be as free as it is:
• It's natural that some pages turn out like this
• So it's natural the web is a little bit shitty all over
• So it's natural the demand for richer web features is low
— Offline support
— Media capture
— Picture-in-picture
— Storage
— Speech synthesis
As well as five more APIs with caveats:
— Installation
— Notifications
— Web Push
— Barcode detection
— Speech recognition
Even taking into account that it also evidently loses support for one (audio session; I wonder if that that has to do with potential for fingerprinting), framing this feature differential between two minor(!) releases as “intentional crippling of Mobile Safari continues” strikes me as somewhat loaded.
Offline support has been available (and buggy, YMMV) for a long time.
Web Push has been available since 16.4 (with a lot of caveats)
I haven't heard anything about installation (but I may have missed something)
For example, in the column for my current iOS version offline support is crossed out, and for the upcoming version it has a check mark.
If the claim being made is that pwa.gripe is a bad source, I can only assure I have nothing to do with the site. If they misinform visitors about Safari’s capabilities with regard to PWAs, you should post it as a top-level comment.
It includes dates for when these things were first shipped, explanations for that they do, and what kind of standards (or not) they are.
Oh wait. You don't care about small details like that. None of these Chrome shilling websites do.
Likewise, you can click on the Chrome icon to change comparison browser. Here's a list of features implemented in Firefox on Android but not in Safari on iOS (and therefore, not in Firefox on iOS either):
https://ios404.com/?browsers=andff
Fwiw, I've been a Firefox user for about 9 years. I would love to see Firefox be able to ship their engine on iOS. The main reason Firefox haven't implemented as many features as Chrome is that they lack the resources to. Anti-competitive behaviour has hurt them a lot, and being forced to use a sub-par, undifferentiated browser engine on iOS - the world's most valuable and influential OS, has played a big part in this.
Second, Safari has a monopoly on iOS and controls what other browsers can support on the platform (that also usually means "less than Safari", because SF gets to support things first). They are in a unique position to hold back the entire web, even on other platforms. They're holding the standards hostage by not allowing the market to decide which features are important to them (and put pressure on Safari and FF to implement them)
It would be fine if they just made Safari bad, that's their choice. But they don't stop there: they make the entire web bad on iOS purposely to promote the native apps they can tax.
But for software, not so much.
Examples:
* Windows N (no media player stuff) and KN (no media player stuff, no messenger)
* Windows installed in the EEA (ability to disable / change start menu search with Bing, ability to remove Edge, ability to add widget providers)
* iOS with only allowing 3rd party app stores and 3rd party browser engines in the EEA.
* Google only allowing certain things when the phone is in the USA.
And it's gonna get worse with age verification. All of the sudden the manufacturers have even more data.
I don't think Apple is terribly interested in market share for Safari. What they are interested is preserving their competitive advantage in privacy.
Google pays Apple $20B a year because of the market share Safari has on iOS.
I'd call that "interest"
That's 10% of their turnover (and likely mostly pure profit, as they seem to spend a fraction of that on Safari)
How do you explain that all other OSes, including Apple's own macOS, manage to allow other browser engines?
Do you think the iOS team is that incompetent?
They’re the advertiser-focused company. Bluetooth and NFC aren’t being exposed for developers first.
Chrome APIs and Electron crap, and then everyone complains about Microsoft.
I’m also not sure how accurate this page is. They claim Chrome on Android supports registerProtocolHandler while MDN says it’s not supported there.
I agree an open web platform is good. But i also think some of the things added to the browser don’t belong in the browser. Face detection? i don’t need that.
I am much more partial to attempts to force apple to enable installing 3rd party apps than i am forcing them to bloat the browser with more ways for websites to monitize me.
You forgot to mention the long mustache your cartoon villain MBA is twisting while they sabotage Safari.
I left after seeing Contact Picker API listed. Contact Picker API is, per the MDN link in the OP, marked as "This is an experimental technology." It is "not Baseline because it does not work in some of the most widely-used browsers."
You can of course dislike this, but not even native apps allow background sync anyway, so of course web apps would not be allowed to do this either.
I want to auto-deny websites asking me for location permissions. But I want to be able to grant location permissions to installed web apps on a case-by-case basis just like with regular apps.
- The app store tax
- The extra work of maintaining at least 2 separate apps (iOS, Android, optionally(?) desktop web app)
- Dealing with app store rules
Some of these are not just costs. I have experience with native apps that have to make things worse for users (compared to the web app) or risk getting booted off the app store.
Apple is not just holding back PWA on iOS, they're holding back the entire web everywhere.
Compare that with desktop, where web apps (maybe not PWAs, strictly speaking) are dominating: Gmail, Office/Docs, GitHub, Figma, you basically do everything in web apps.
And if you count Electron [1]: VSCode, Slack, Spotify, etc, etc.
[1] Importantly, Electron lets you bring your own (browser) engine. You can build a native app on iOS that is just a wrapper around a web app, but it has to run on iOS' WebKit, and is thus limited by what Apple deems worthy
Second: There are many reasons why businesses would opt for a native app. Notifications, for one (not available on the web on iOS until just a couple of years ago). Also, native apps allow for more tracking (whereas browsers are paranoid by default).
Third: A few years back, companies like FB, Google and Twitter all launched "Lite" versions of their apps, specifically targeted at Africa and other developing markets. They were all web apps (or wrappers around web apps). I will admit that this was years ago, and I have not checked if these Lite versions are still around and/or widely used.
How is the barcode detection API a security risk for example? Having it implemented would be amazing for web apps.
Also there's features like deep linking into PWAs that ought to be pretty basic PWA functionality that's not on this list that even Safari on Mac OSX has but Safari on iOS doesn't. Even the add to home screen menu option is deliberately made hard to find.
Apple doing this for the benefit of the user is one of the less likely hypotheses.
It infuriates me a lot more than all the liquid glass stuff (on which I’m neutral overall).
Search is where it always was (type in the search bar, scroll past the google results to the in-page results) and bookmarking is also where it’s always been (share button “add bookmark”)
Either I’m dumb or there is a discoverability problem with all these features. Probably a bit of both.
Which is why i didn’t notice the change, as i had already set this setting to put the url back at the top an update or two ago.
And yes, definitely discoverability issues.
That's where they burry all bodies.
I have no desire for random websites to have that much access to my phone.
Nested scrollbars! Horizontal and vertical scroll!
People saying they don't want these features are missing the point. Its about control and if developers have the option to make something as a website that actually works that gives them less incentive to make an app that apple can take 30% of your profit from while you are forced to write in their proprietary language for the stuff that only works on their devices.
So much engineering duplication of effort and waste just to satisfy a bottom line.
And you can write iOS apps in objective c, swift, kotlin, jacascript, rust, ruby, and a few dozen other languages.
And yes, you can write native apps in a lot of languages, but you can't choose how/where you distribute.
On the web, you can. It's built that way.
But either way the issue is the same - apple preventing us from installing what we want. But my solution protects freedom in a more robust way: if you break the app store monopoly, you can install chrome or firefox and do all the web-app-platform nonsense you want. If safari adds all the features on that list you’re still stuck demanding apple add a new feature every time you want to innovate.
And as for programming - for the web you can write in a lot of languages but you only have two options For debugging - js and webassembly.
Push notifications are the #1 featured requests of my online community. Some even switched to Android over it.
And people don't understand adding sites to their homescreen, especially since Apple buried that feature in the Share menu.
No Android user of my website ever complained about the WebPush notifications.
That sounds like the market working, no? Some people like how Apple does things, so they stick with Apple. Others prefer Android, so they switch.
The point is that users should have choice, not force users to bend to the will of malicious developers.
99.9% of the things listed in that stupid table in the blog just stink of being potential attack vectors.
And we know just how heavily smartphones are targeted and how smart and sneaky some of the latest vectors are.
Keep going Apple.
The UX of visiting a site and with a single click of a button having an app on my home screen sounds great. I'd also like to have the option of side loading a native app too. And if those options sound unappealing, you can keep using the App Store if you want the assurance of using an 'officially approved' app.
A lot of very prominent apps are written using web technologies anyways. Take a look at the continued popularity of React Native (and Flutter as well).
And it shows through their laggy interfaces and non-native UI/UX. The people don't like apps built with web tech; developers and LLMs like them because they're a shortcut.
Then why do most people spend > 90% of their time in a browser (or web-powered app) on desktop?
My only peeve is that Apple resets the feature flags with every update. So the one experimental feature I use I have to reenable each and every time I get a phone update.
Reminds me of the days when all the corporate coders thought the IE apis were the only ones worth using.
So if you accessed $megacorp website on a non-IE browser it was your fault for not using IE and not their fault for failing interop.
(tbh I don't know if the list is simply Chrome-centric or if there's a good reason behind, but it struck me as interesting)