Apple is just taking a page from Microsoft's old playbook, sabotaging the Web platform in order to prop up the competitiveness of its native platform. When MS o

Apple is just taking a page from Microsoft's old playbook, sabotaging the Web platform in order to prop up the competitiveness of its native platform. When MS owned the dominant platform, they made sure that the Web browser they shipped pre-installed on every Windows machine was always just good enough to claim to be a usable Web browser (or it might have driven people away from Windows), yet always bad enough to make the Web itself look bad compared to Windows. With the biggest benefit of the Web being its reach, anything that could limit the reach of new powers could hold back its spread, and MS did hold back its spread for years. At the same time Apple, having no leverage from their own native OS of the present, touted their hardware/OS/browser stack as the best way to use the platform of the future--the Web--to make themselves more relevant in a MS-dominated world and sell more hardware. They did a lot of good for the Web platform in the past. Fast forward to today: the iPhone ignited the explosion of mobile computing and made Windows' dominance of the desktop into being merely the biggest frog in a smaller and smaller pond. MS no longer had a monopoly to defend, repented for its sins, and began to build first-rate, evergreen browsers to stay relevant in the new world. (Competition is a wonderful thing.) And Apple took their place, not as the monopoly OS in the new, big pond, but as an OS that was a large enough part of it that it could make things "not work on the Web" by making them not work on iOS. They manage to frequently be behind in getting new things to work in Safari (cf: caniuse.com), while being careful not to be so far behind that it affects their reputation with the general public and weakens them in competition with Android, and they prohibit any superior browser from interfering with this delicate "hurt the Web without hurting yourself" strategy by banning all others from iOS. The result is that anything iOS Safari can't do, Web developers can't use: iOS Safari's shortcomings appear to be the Web's shortcomings, which can be overcome by committing to Apple-proprietary alternatives. They can't afford to fall too far behind, though, or conventional wisdom will gradually emerge that iOS isn't as good as Android at "Web stuff". And as "Web stuff" improves on other platforms, the Web matters more and more as does your reputation for supporting it. If developers, blogs, pundits would talk and post about it every time iOS Safari fails, yet again, to support some new Web technology, and even release some features that work nicely on Android/Chrome but require a native app on iOS, "because, you know, the iPhone's Web support is not very good, as everyone knows...", it will increase the pressure on Apple to shift the balance of "good but not too good" farther forward.