I can imagine that there are a few developers, and perhaps managers, at Apple who absolutely love the promise of WebAssembly... and they are constantly being ac

I can imagine that there are a few developers, and perhaps managers, at Apple who absolutely love the promise of WebAssembly... and they are constantly being accosted by their colleagues who recognize that the success of WebAssembly is a knife right at the heart of the App Store's current revenue model. After all, why pay Apple a cut when you can have a native-performance web app that has its own in-app purchases? And of course, the developers fight back with the idea that iOS at a platform can't fall behind if the rest of the industry is moving towards WebAssembly, but that's by its very nature a long-term vs. short-term argument. So one can imagine that these heroic devs might attempt to get a better fix into a high-priority patch release - perhaps they even implemented and tested it in whatever passes for 20% time at Apple - and all it takes is one person up the chain to veto its inclusion in favor of a "just kill it to be safe" fix. It's incredibly easy to justify that "kill" in a scare-easy time such as post-Spectre, with everyone's eyes on major platforms, and nobody's going to expend that political capital. And eventually the fix lands in the next minor release, 11.3, at a time when doing so doesn't require those developers to overplay their hand. WebAssembly retreats from battle to fight another day. And the sun rises in the morning.