8 ms·

There may be some legitimate fingerprinting concenrs. But given the list of API's it's hard not to see this as Apple crippling PWAs to prevent them from replaci

by thayne 6y ago

There may be some legitimate fingerprinting concenrs. But given the list of API's it's hard not to see this as Apple crippling PWAs to prevent them from replacing native iOS apps (and hurting Apple's revenue from the Apple tax). And maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't the fingerprinting concern be mitigated by the fact the app has to ask for permission before using the API? If an app that doesn't have to do with MIDI asks for permission to use my MIDI device, I'm going to be instantly suspicious.

chvid 6y ago
Exactly. This is about making sure web apps are not as powerful as native apps. One thing is the revenue generated by the App Store but suppose JavaScript web apps were just as powerful and well integrated as native apps; then why use native apps at all? Why have an App Store at all? Why have a Mac or an iPhone if any device with a modern web browser would do? When Huawei tried to create their alternative to Android. The big thing missing wasn't the hardware or the operation system. It was the App Store with your map app, your banking app, your scooter app and so on. The App Store and the proprietary development platforms for Android and Apple has become a way to keep their duopoly in place.
- mavhc 6y ago
  Isn't Google the one implementing all these APIs though?
  - thayne 6y ago
    But for google, the benefits of having richer web apps on which they can show you ads and have app developers pay google for ads may be more valuable than any revenue they lose from the app store.
    - cthaeh 6y ago
      Or, google isn't as anti-competitive and anti consumer as apple. what a shocker.
    - millstone 6y ago
      Speaking as a Xoogler, there's no coordination between the teams building Chrome APIs and those working on Android. Leadership is content to see what sticks (and they may be right).
      - warkdarrior 6y ago
        Sure, they are not micromanaging the Chrome APIs or the Android APIs. But the strategic direction is clear: "develop more web APIs and make them useful, so more people stay on the web so we can show more ads."
- millstone 6y ago
  I like having apps that work and feel the same. I can bring my knowledge from one app to another. I can develop expertise on a platform. The web is culturally unable to do that. Look at a sophisticated web app, like Google Docs. This has a menu bar, which is a bad copy of the native Mac menu bar. Web apps are copying native app conventions, to try to be more familiar. But they're also eroding those conventions. Eventually only click and swipe will be left. And this problem is not going to be solved by Web MIDI or whatever.
  - cj 6y ago
    I think you’re trying to say that Mac OS or Windows native apps have pretty much the same UI/UX conventions which makes it easy to use any app on that platform. And that Web Apps have UI/UX that is less consistent than apps across OS’s. I can’t say I agree with this. There are a ton of MacOs apps that implement fully custom GUI (first one that comes to mind is Jira native Mac app which looks nothing like a Mac app I’ve seen before) I agree web apps are likely eroding OS conventions though. The Jira app is an example of that (they decided to make their native app look and behave the same as the Jira Web App instead of using standard MacOS GUI conventions. It’s a tough trade off.
    - millstone 6y ago
      Yeah and Spotify is another one. Electron is clearly at work here, probably in your Jira example too. These apps are frustrating for someone accustomed to the Mac UI. Basic interactions (like context menus) don't work at all, or work in unexpected ways. I have no idea what these apps can do because they all have a unique UI vocabulary. So I don't try. I think Apple has really dropped the ball on this. They ought to have spotted and embraced the web's great strengths early. Ephemeral, zero-install apps, using native components - that's the platform I want. Though I understand how others may disagree.
- schwartzworld 6y ago
  Android supports PWA and let's you install apps without their app store, not the same as apple at all
- Razengan 6y ago
  No. This is about privacy. Why have native apps at all? Because web apps are crap, excuse my Swahili.
kyranjamie 6y ago
Almost certainly an excuse to further suppress PWAs.
tuxone 6y ago
Are you all serious about this ask for permission thing? Good luck explaining MIDI, HID, NFC and so on to the average Joe, in a small popup. We already have enough “I agree” buttons popping over the screen. Web should be built for everybody, it’s not the nineties anymore.
- MatekCopatek 6y ago
  Sure, but Apple could solve that by requiring a user action to show that popup dialog. Or they could even block everything by default and force you to give permissions manually. That way average Joe is blisfully unaware of anything and completely safe while you just have to suffer a minor inconvenience of whitelisting that one legit website the first time you use it.
- brlewis 6y ago
  Sorry, but Average Joe needs to learn this one thing to adapt to the modern web: Say no. Average Joe doesn't need to learn what all these things are. In the unlikely event he knows what the thing is and knows that he wants it, he can answer yes. But his default response needs to be no. >Web should be built for everybody Exactly. That's why Average Joe needs to adapt.
bartread 6y ago
> If an app that doesn't have to do with MIDI asks for permission to use my MIDI device, I'm going to be instantly suspicious. Sure, you'll be suspicious, but I seriously doubt you're the average user. I bet a very large proportion of Safari users have no idea what a MIDI device is and some significant portion of them wouldn't think twice about granting those permissions.
- mavhc 6y ago
  I'd assume the small percentage with a midi device who are going to music app websites would be more likely to know
  - mynameisvlad 6y ago
    Anyone can request MIDI permissions. The parent comment implies a bad actor using the API for something like fingerprinting, and a common user who may have never even heard of MIDI, let alone have a device.
    - mavhc 6y ago
      But won't the user then go "why would I allow this website to access something I don't know about?" or, if they clicked yes anyway, the entropy would be ~0 as they have no midi devices. This is assuming we moved to a model where more permissions had to be requested rather than just allowed
      - mynameisvlad 6y ago
        No, of course they wouldn't. You or I would, sure, but a regular user is pretty much conditioned to accept whatever to make the page load.
        mavhc 6y ago
        If they don't care about privacy enough to learn about it, that's fair, no point wasting your time to avoid a problem that isn't affecting you much.
keriati1 6y ago
Yep, seems like apple made another move against the web.
osrec 6y ago
Despite this, I believe PWAs will eventually win, and Apple will be forced to comply if they wish to stay relevant. Their browser share dropped a little recently (https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share). If that continues, it'll certainly irk them!
- exacube 6y ago
  Consider that browser share usage could shift around as device usage shifts around during a pandemic.
  - osrec 6y ago
    I don't disagree, but would you expect such a significant drop in Safari usage?
    - ComputerGuru 6y ago
      It’s possible if people are using company-provided devices at home in lieu of their own, and the company is providing Windows devices while theirs were Apple. I don’t know the likelihood of this explanation, though.
      - osrec 6y ago
        I would personally think this is unlikely. Looking at https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-version-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-version-market-share we can see that Safari on iPhone probably caused the overall drop. Now, I can't see people suddenly not using their iPhone because of the pandemic (quite the contrary actually) - perhaps this signifies a slowdown in iPhone sales?
- summerlight 6y ago
  IMO, that won't happen until either Apple gives up their control on browser "engine" choices on iOS or Apple itself becomes irrelevant.
Joeri 6y ago
I don’t even want these 16 api’s. I want a way to do notifications and a way to store more than 50 mb on ios. Sure, make me and the user jump through hoops to make sure I’m not abusive, but with those two there are a ton of apps which I can build as pwa’s. The app clips feature they showed? That should have been a qr code triggered pwa with notifications, except everybody had to build it as an app because they couldn’t do notifications, and then apple used the cumbersome nature of those apps as the reason for app clips. It’s the snake eating its own tail, and I’m getting IE6 vibes because microsoft also strategically stopped improving IE for web apps because they wanted to push app developers to native because of the improved user experience. Yeah, the web is worse, but worse is better.
- larme 6y ago
  I’m very glad a web page cannot store 50mb data and send notification to me. You only think from a developer’s perspective. What if you are the user receiving 50 notification requirement a day from a web browser?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - danudey 6y ago
    Then you tap on the notification and say "turn off" and then it stops happening.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      I don't want that notification.
    - jakear 6y ago
      This isn’t able notifications, this is about the “do you want to allow notifications” prompts. Crazy how in the same HN community you have people on one post complaining that there are too damn many cookie/gdpr/etc prompts, then on the next post asking for additional notification prompts. What ever happened to going to a website and consuming its content and leaving? I get that making an app instead of a PWA is a pain the in the ass, but the reason I pay $$$ to Apple is so that pains like that exist in the developer’s ass instead of mine. I want to be in their walled garden and I want them to keep lazy developers and poor UX out.
danudey 6y ago
Do you honestly think that Apple would lose enough money by implementing Web MIDI for Safari on iOS that this would be even the most remote consideration? Like, the Safari team was in a meeting about Web MIDI and some manager said "but think of the impact on our stock options!" and they all went "oooooh" and scrapped it? Or is it that Tim Cook was looking at Apple's balance sheet and decided that they couldn't afford to lose the 30% cut of all the MIDI-capable iOS/iPadOS apps that could be completely replaced by a web app? The reality is that the real cost of this feature to them would be developer time; it would be a colossal waste of their limited WebKit/Safari developer resources to implement Web MIDI rather than something that would actually be used by more than a scant sliver of a percentage of Safari users.
- jdmg94 6y ago
  I wished they implemented the Fullscreen API for iPhones...
- schwartzworld 6y ago
  apple fanboys will accept anything from apple. No headphone jack? it's an improvement! w3 spec not implemented? they are working on more important features! antenna stops working if you hold the phone wrong? I like it that way!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
suyash 6y ago
PWA's have always lagged behind Native Capabilities, even when API's exist the performance has been poor for high performance apps so the allegation doesn't quite make sense to me.
QUFB 6y ago
Apple is a corporation listed on a US exchange, an entity where the only motivation is to generate profit for shareholders. It helps for corporations to frame business decisions in moral terms. If Apple cares about privacy, it is only because there is alignment with profit. If Apple cares about locking out APIs that disrupt their App Store profit, it doesn't hurt to frame the decision in privacy terms. Currently my desire for both privacy, convenience, and usability align with Apple's current business decisions, so I choose iPhone. When Apple pivots to a new business model, I'll find the best compromise product.
- millstone 6y ago
  I disagree strongly. Apple leaves money on the table by not aggressively tracking its users. And their investment in e.g. accessibility is certainly not driven by bottom-line considerations. Apple is relevant today because they actually are focused on products, not profits. Sometimes it really is that simple.
  - asadkn 6y ago
    It's naive to think any company exists for any other purpose than maximizing profit. That's business 101.
scarface74 6y ago
Every time I see this argument I have the same question. How many successful web apps are there for Android? Apps that make the most money on the App Store are free to play games with in app purchases of loot boxe, coins, etc. how many of those are feasible on the web? On the other hand, which apps that make money via in app purchases would be viable and successful as web apps?
- millstone 6y ago
  I think most would be as successful IF they had an equally frictionless payment system. Big hits like Candy Crush could easily be built as a web app. These are not pushing the boundaries of software, they're just exploiting our psychology.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    If PWA support is so good on Android, there should be a lot of successful profitable PWA’s on Android. Chrome supports the Web Payments API that should make payments seamless in the browser.
    - harpratap 6y ago
      I have removed all my e-commerce apps and use on web versions of those on my phones (Flipkart agrees - https://www.pwastats.com/2017/08/flipkart/ https://www.pwastats.com/2017/08/flipkart/ ). I saw my parents doing the same when they uninstalled a bunch of apps like FB & Pinterest and started using the web versions instead to save space and don't seem to have any negative experience.
      - scarface74 6y ago
        Which still doesn’t support the argument that Apple wants to cripple PWAs because it makes money on the App Store. Those apps would have been free on the App Store and since they are selling physical goods, Apple wouldn’t have made any money on in app purchases.

by thayne 6y ago

chvid 6y ago

Exactly. This is about making sure web apps are not as powerful as native apps. One thing is the revenue generated by the App Store but suppose JavaScript web apps were just as powerful and well integrated as native apps; then why use native apps at all? Why have an App Store at all? Why have a Mac or an iPhone if any device with a modern web browser would do? When Huawei tried to create their alternative to Android. The big thing missing wasn't the hardware or the operation system. It was the App Store with your map app, your banking app, your scooter app and so on. The App Store and the proprietary development platforms for Android and Apple has become a way to keep their duopoly in place.

mavhc 6y ago
Isn't Google the one implementing all these APIs though?
- thayne 6y ago
  But for google, the benefits of having richer web apps on which they can show you ads and have app developers pay google for ads may be more valuable than any revenue they lose from the app store.
  - cthaeh 6y ago
    Or, google isn't as anti-competitive and anti consumer as apple. what a shocker.
  - millstone 6y ago
    Speaking as a Xoogler, there's no coordination between the teams building Chrome APIs and those working on Android. Leadership is content to see what sticks (and they may be right).
    - warkdarrior 6y ago
      Sure, they are not micromanaging the Chrome APIs or the Android APIs. But the strategic direction is clear: "develop more web APIs and make them useful, so more people stay on the web so we can show more ads."
millstone 6y ago
I like having apps that work and feel the same. I can bring my knowledge from one app to another. I can develop expertise on a platform. The web is culturally unable to do that. Look at a sophisticated web app, like Google Docs. This has a menu bar, which is a bad copy of the native Mac menu bar. Web apps are copying native app conventions, to try to be more familiar. But they're also eroding those conventions. Eventually only click and swipe will be left. And this problem is not going to be solved by Web MIDI or whatever.
- cj 6y ago
  I think you’re trying to say that Mac OS or Windows native apps have pretty much the same UI/UX conventions which makes it easy to use any app on that platform. And that Web Apps have UI/UX that is less consistent than apps across OS’s. I can’t say I agree with this. There are a ton of MacOs apps that implement fully custom GUI (first one that comes to mind is Jira native Mac app which looks nothing like a Mac app I’ve seen before) I agree web apps are likely eroding OS conventions though. The Jira app is an example of that (they decided to make their native app look and behave the same as the Jira Web App instead of using standard MacOS GUI conventions. It’s a tough trade off.
  - millstone 6y ago
    Yeah and Spotify is another one. Electron is clearly at work here, probably in your Jira example too. These apps are frustrating for someone accustomed to the Mac UI. Basic interactions (like context menus) don't work at all, or work in unexpected ways. I have no idea what these apps can do because they all have a unique UI vocabulary. So I don't try. I think Apple has really dropped the ball on this. They ought to have spotted and embraced the web's great strengths early. Ephemeral, zero-install apps, using native components - that's the platform I want. Though I understand how others may disagree.
schwartzworld 6y ago
Android supports PWA and let's you install apps without their app store, not the same as apple at all
Razengan 6y ago
No. This is about privacy. Why have native apps at all? Because web apps are crap, excuse my Swahili.

kyranjamie 6y ago

Almost certainly an excuse to further suppress PWAs.

tuxone 6y ago

Are you all serious about this ask for permission thing? Good luck explaining MIDI, HID, NFC and so on to the average Joe, in a small popup. We already have enough “I agree” buttons popping over the screen. Web should be built for everybody, it’s not the nineties anymore.

MatekCopatek 6y ago
Sure, but Apple could solve that by requiring a user action to show that popup dialog. Or they could even block everything by default and force you to give permissions manually. That way average Joe is blisfully unaware of anything and completely safe while you just have to suffer a minor inconvenience of whitelisting that one legit website the first time you use it.
brlewis 6y ago
Sorry, but Average Joe needs to learn this one thing to adapt to the modern web: Say no. Average Joe doesn't need to learn what all these things are. In the unlikely event he knows what the thing is and knows that he wants it, he can answer yes. But his default response needs to be no. >Web should be built for everybody Exactly. That's why Average Joe needs to adapt.

bartread 6y ago

> If an app that doesn't have to do with MIDI asks for permission to use my MIDI device, I'm going to be instantly suspicious. Sure, you'll be suspicious, but I seriously doubt you're the average user. I bet a very large proportion of Safari users have no idea what a MIDI device is and some significant portion of them wouldn't think twice about granting those permissions.

mavhc 6y ago
I'd assume the small percentage with a midi device who are going to music app websites would be more likely to know
- mynameisvlad 6y ago
  Anyone can request MIDI permissions. The parent comment implies a bad actor using the API for something like fingerprinting, and a common user who may have never even heard of MIDI, let alone have a device.
  - mavhc 6y ago
    But won't the user then go "why would I allow this website to access something I don't know about?" or, if they clicked yes anyway, the entropy would be ~0 as they have no midi devices. This is assuming we moved to a model where more permissions had to be requested rather than just allowed
    - mynameisvlad 6y ago
      No, of course they wouldn't. You or I would, sure, but a regular user is pretty much conditioned to accept whatever to make the page load.
      - mavhc 6y ago
        If they don't care about privacy enough to learn about it, that's fair, no point wasting your time to avoid a problem that isn't affecting you much.

keriati1 6y ago

Yep, seems like apple made another move against the web.

osrec 6y ago

Despite this, I believe PWAs will eventually win, and Apple will be forced to comply if they wish to stay relevant. Their browser share dropped a little recently (https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share). If that continues, it'll certainly irk them!

exacube 6y ago
Consider that browser share usage could shift around as device usage shifts around during a pandemic.
- osrec 6y ago
  I don't disagree, but would you expect such a significant drop in Safari usage?
  - ComputerGuru 6y ago
    It’s possible if people are using company-provided devices at home in lieu of their own, and the company is providing Windows devices while theirs were Apple. I don’t know the likelihood of this explanation, though.
    - osrec 6y ago
      I would personally think this is unlikely. Looking at https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-version-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-version-market-share we can see that Safari on iPhone probably caused the overall drop. Now, I can't see people suddenly not using their iPhone because of the pandemic (quite the contrary actually) - perhaps this signifies a slowdown in iPhone sales?
summerlight 6y ago
IMO, that won't happen until either Apple gives up their control on browser "engine" choices on iOS or Apple itself becomes irrelevant.

Joeri 6y ago

I don’t even want these 16 api’s. I want a way to do notifications and a way to store more than 50 mb on ios. Sure, make me and the user jump through hoops to make sure I’m not abusive, but with those two there are a ton of apps which I can build as pwa’s. The app clips feature they showed? That should have been a qr code triggered pwa with notifications, except everybody had to build it as an app because they couldn’t do notifications, and then apple used the cumbersome nature of those apps as the reason for app clips. It’s the snake eating its own tail, and I’m getting IE6 vibes because microsoft also strategically stopped improving IE for web apps because they wanted to push app developers to native because of the improved user experience. Yeah, the web is worse, but worse is better.

larme 6y ago
I’m very glad a web page cannot store 50mb data and send notification to me. You only think from a developer’s perspective. What if you are the user receiving 50 notification requirement a day from a web browser?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- danudey 6y ago
  Then you tap on the notification and say "turn off" and then it stops happening.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    I don't want that notification.
  - jakear 6y ago
    This isn’t able notifications, this is about the “do you want to allow notifications” prompts. Crazy how in the same HN community you have people on one post complaining that there are too damn many cookie/gdpr/etc prompts, then on the next post asking for additional notification prompts. What ever happened to going to a website and consuming its content and leaving? I get that making an app instead of a PWA is a pain the in the ass, but the reason I pay $$$ to Apple is so that pains like that exist in the developer’s ass instead of mine. I want to be in their walled garden and I want them to keep lazy developers and poor UX out.

danudey 6y ago

Do you honestly think that Apple would lose enough money by implementing Web MIDI for Safari on iOS that this would be even the most remote consideration? Like, the Safari team was in a meeting about Web MIDI and some manager said "but think of the impact on our stock options!" and they all went "oooooh" and scrapped it? Or is it that Tim Cook was looking at Apple's balance sheet and decided that they couldn't afford to lose the 30% cut of all the MIDI-capable iOS/iPadOS apps that could be completely replaced by a web app? The reality is that the real cost of this feature to them would be developer time; it would be a colossal waste of their limited WebKit/Safari developer resources to implement Web MIDI rather than something that would actually be used by more than a scant sliver of a percentage of Safari users.

jdmg94 6y ago
I wished they implemented the Fullscreen API for iPhones...
schwartzworld 6y ago
apple fanboys will accept anything from apple. No headphone jack? it's an improvement! w3 spec not implemented? they are working on more important features! antenna stops working if you hold the phone wrong? I like it that way!

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

suyash 6y ago

PWA's have always lagged behind Native Capabilities, even when API's exist the performance has been poor for high performance apps so the allegation doesn't quite make sense to me.

QUFB 6y ago

Apple is a corporation listed on a US exchange, an entity where the only motivation is to generate profit for shareholders. It helps for corporations to frame business decisions in moral terms. If Apple cares about privacy, it is only because there is alignment with profit. If Apple cares about locking out APIs that disrupt their App Store profit, it doesn't hurt to frame the decision in privacy terms. Currently my desire for both privacy, convenience, and usability align with Apple's current business decisions, so I choose iPhone. When Apple pivots to a new business model, I'll find the best compromise product.

millstone 6y ago
I disagree strongly. Apple leaves money on the table by not aggressively tracking its users. And their investment in e.g. accessibility is certainly not driven by bottom-line considerations. Apple is relevant today because they actually are focused on products, not profits. Sometimes it really is that simple.
- asadkn 6y ago
  It's naive to think any company exists for any other purpose than maximizing profit. That's business 101.

scarface74 6y ago

Every time I see this argument I have the same question. How many successful web apps are there for Android? Apps that make the most money on the App Store are free to play games with in app purchases of loot boxe, coins, etc. how many of those are feasible on the web? On the other hand, which apps that make money via in app purchases would be viable and successful as web apps?

millstone 6y ago
I think most would be as successful IF they had an equally frictionless payment system. Big hits like Candy Crush could easily be built as a web app. These are not pushing the boundaries of software, they're just exploiting our psychology.
- scarface74 6y ago
  If PWA support is so good on Android, there should be a lot of successful profitable PWA’s on Android. Chrome supports the Web Payments API that should make payments seamless in the browser.
  - harpratap 6y ago
    I have removed all my e-commerce apps and use on web versions of those on my phones (Flipkart agrees - https://www.pwastats.com/2017/08/flipkart/ https://www.pwastats.com/2017/08/flipkart/ ). I saw my parents doing the same when they uninstalled a bunch of apps like FB & Pinterest and started using the web versions instead to save space and don't seem to have any negative experience.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      Which still doesn’t support the argument that Apple wants to cripple PWAs because it makes money on the App Store. Those apps would have been free on the App Store and since they are selling physical goods, Apple wouldn’t have made any money on in app purchases.