9 ms·

> in light of their significant investment in supporting PWAs over the last four years Investing in PWAs for four years is only going to get you so far when yo

> in light of their significant investment in supporting PWAs over the last four years Investing in PWAs for four years is only going to get you so far when you’re eight years behind the competition. Obviously I’m making numbers up here but to my perspective Apple’s recent investments (bringing them to a level still behind competitors) has a lot more to do with staving off legal threats to their 30% cut on native apps (e.g. the Epic lawsuit) than any benevolence towards the web platform.

turquoisevar 3y ago
> Investing in PWAs for four years is only going to get you so far when you’re eight years behind the competition. I don’t think this speaks to intention, the investments that have been made and are still being made bring with them a cost, both in a monetary sense and in other ways. Regardless of the separate question with regards to them having been able to catch up with the competition. A generous interpretation, with the presupposed premise that they haven’t been able to catch up, could say that it warrants a more favorable interpretation of their intentions if they were willing to invest after having lagged behind for so long, because the required investment would be greater and the pay off less clear. > (bringing them to a level still behind competitors) Let’s be honest here. When people say something like this, they’re mainly thinking of Chrome/Chromium-based browsers. Google is known to have no qualms supporting certain things that both Mozilla and Apple are uncomfortable with, while at the same time implementing a bunch of stuff that isn’t standardized. On the whole, Safari/WebKit has roughly met Mozilla’s level of support for frameworks and APIs and even surpassed Mozilla on certain things (especially desktop). Of course if the benchmark is just Chromium, then none of it will ever be enough, then again, Mozilla doesn’t seem to catch a lot of flack for drawing a line in the sand in terms of support. Other than that, Safari seems to be doing great on test suites/benchmarks that focus on progress such as the annual Interop. Consistently[0] keeping up[1] over the years[2], and sometimes coming out on top[3]. > has a lot more to do with staving off legal threats to their 30% cut on native apps (e.g. the Epic lawsuit) than any benevolence towards the web platform. I tend to stay clear with attributing maleficence or less than generous intentions without something substantial to back it up. Especially when behavior seems to contradict such attributions. For example, if that where the main motivator then I’d expect a bare minimum approach and Apple dragging their feet, like we see with DMA implementations (e.g., only allowing what must be allowed in the EU instead of globally), instead we not only see improvement of PWA support, in part beyond what Mozilla supports, but also direct contributions of standards that PWAs rely on in the form of improvements.. 0: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2021?stable https://wpt.fyi/interop-2021?stable 1: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2023?stable https://wpt.fyi/interop-2023?stable 2: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2024 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2024 3: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022?stable https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022?stable
- lubujackson 3y ago
  On the flip side, I think past actions are a better indicator of intent than assuming good intent. Having a closed ecosystem has been baked into Apple's DNA since day 1. Not just software, but even the hardware was sealed to prevent modifications to the hardware in an age when upgrading and modding PCs was the norm. Over the past few decades there have been a lot of changes at Apple, but preventing user customization has been intertwined with their design-first philosophy. It seems naive to think they are doing anything but the minimal required action to maintain their hermetically sealed ecosystem.
scarface_74 3y ago
This makes absolutely no sense. It came out in the Eoic trial that 90% of App Store revenue comes from games and in app purchases. Those apps are no more going to leave the App Store and go to the web than they are going to leave the Google Pay Store. In app purchases monetize too well and people aren’t going to put their credit cards on every third party website. That’s not even to mention all of the ways that you can pay via in app purchases that you can’t pay via the web and all of the kids with phones without credit cards attached. If it’s only Apple, then why aren’t Android developers creating great PWAs to escape the same 30%?
- afavour 3y ago
  > Those apps are no more going to leave the App Store and go to the web than they are going to leave the Google Pay Store. ...Microsoft did exactly that, though: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/30/hands-on-xbox-cloud-gaming/ https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/30/hands-on-xbox-cloud-gam... I don't really understand the rest of your argument. "Of course developers aren't going to use the web instead of apps, it's a way worse experience!" is precisely the point in criticizing Apple letting the web platform languish. They have a vested interest in making sure the in-app experience remains superior to web experience because of their 30% cut.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    If it’s just Apple, then why aren’t developers leaving Google Play Services in droves to avoid the same 30% cut? And Microsoft did that not because they didn’t want to be in the store, but because at the time Apple wouldn’t allow them. Yes I disagree with this. If PWAs could be made one to one with apps - and today games like Candy Crush could be web apps - game developers who make up 90% of App Store revenue still wouldn’t give up the direct access to users wallets they get from in app purchases.
    - int_19h 3y ago
      If PWAs were on par with native feature-wise, why couldn't they have single-click in-app purchases? All you'd need is some large trusted platform to provide a single sign-on experience and process payments.
brookst 3y ago
I don’t think the comment you’re replying to was saying Apple’s PWA support was world-leading. I think it was saying that if Apple wanted to kill PWA it would have made more sense to just not make those investments over the past four years.
- kelthuzad 3y ago
  >I think it was saying that if Apple wanted to kill PWA it would have made more sense to just not make those investments over the past four years. wrong, Apple only started implementing the bare minimum because they felt the heat from devs & feared the legal consequences for their anti-competitive behavior. Apple still has the unquenchable desire to kill PWAs, they will just keep sabotaging them more subtly. Apple will keep up their shenanigans until the bitter end, but I hope that the EU will have none of it.
- afavour 3y ago
  Yes… and what I was saying in my response is that even if Apple did want to kill PWA there is good legal reason to have made the investments they have in the past few years. In court they can argue that app makers are free to make a PWA if they don’t want to pay the 30% cut. If they removed PWA support they’d not be able to make that argument.
- nox101 3y ago
  The cynical view would be that apple was only doing that to try staving off anti-trust litigation. The fact that PWAs are seriously crippled on iOS vs Android still seems certainly makes it appear Apple has ulterior motives. If you make PWAs not able to do everything a native app can do then you're incentivizing native apps. Apple wants everything to go through their store. (1) so they can ban anything they don't like. (2) they can get their 30% (can't get 30% of websites)
  - agust 3y ago
    I'd say this is not a cynical view at all, rather a quite realistic one. They only added support for push notifications to iOS in 2023 (7 years after Firefox and 8 years after Chrome on Android), right after the UK regulator started its investigation in mobile ecosystems.
wolfendin 3y ago
“The competition” is just Google/Chrome. Unless there’s someone else?
- afavour 3y ago
  I don’t understand the relevance of that, why would it invalidate the point?
dwaite 3y ago
> Investing in PWAs for four years is only going to get you so far when you’re eight years behind the competition. Which non-Chromium competitors are you speaking to here? What are some examples of standards-track features that they implement that Apple doesn't?
- afavour 3y ago
  > What are some examples of standards-track features that they implement that Apple doesn't? Lack of any obvious method to actually install a PWA is probably the biggest blocker to PWA adoption today. They aren’t yet a web standard but citing standards always feels like a very convenient argument: there are a great many web features implemented by most browsers before they become standards. Multiple implementations are often part of the standardisation process. When iOS finally implemented Web Push they gated it to only apply to Home Screen installed apps and those who defend Apple lauded the decision. Yet there’s absolutely no mention of that behaviour in web standards. Apple, like every browser creator, takes web standards as advisory and implements the parts they want, in the way they want.

turquoisevar 3y ago

> Investing in PWAs for four years is only going to get you so far when you’re eight years behind the competition. I don’t think this speaks to intention, the investments that have been made and are still being made bring with them a cost, both in a monetary sense and in other ways. Regardless of the separate question with regards to them having been able to catch up with the competition. A generous interpretation, with the presupposed premise that they haven’t been able to catch up, could say that it warrants a more favorable interpretation of their intentions if they were willing to invest after having lagged behind for so long, because the required investment would be greater and the pay off less clear. > (bringing them to a level still behind competitors) Let’s be honest here. When people say something like this, they’re mainly thinking of Chrome/Chromium-based browsers. Google is known to have no qualms supporting certain things that both Mozilla and Apple are uncomfortable with, while at the same time implementing a bunch of stuff that isn’t standardized. On the whole, Safari/WebKit has roughly met Mozilla’s level of support for frameworks and APIs and even surpassed Mozilla on certain things (especially desktop). Of course if the benchmark is just Chromium, then none of it will ever be enough, then again, Mozilla doesn’t seem to catch a lot of flack for drawing a line in the sand in terms of support. Other than that, Safari seems to be doing great on test suites/benchmarks that focus on progress such as the annual Interop. Consistently[0] keeping up[1] over the years[2], and sometimes coming out on top[3]. > has a lot more to do with staving off legal threats to their 30% cut on native apps (e.g. the Epic lawsuit) than any benevolence towards the web platform. I tend to stay clear with attributing maleficence or less than generous intentions without something substantial to back it up. Especially when behavior seems to contradict such attributions. For example, if that where the main motivator then I’d expect a bare minimum approach and Apple dragging their feet, like we see with DMA implementations (e.g., only allowing what must be allowed in the EU instead of globally), instead we not only see improvement of PWA support, in part beyond what Mozilla supports, but also direct contributions of standards that PWAs rely on in the form of improvements.. 0: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2021?stable https://wpt.fyi/interop-2021?stable 1: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2023?stable https://wpt.fyi/interop-2023?stable 2: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2024 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2024 3: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022?stable https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022?stable

lubujackson 3y ago
On the flip side, I think past actions are a better indicator of intent than assuming good intent. Having a closed ecosystem has been baked into Apple's DNA since day 1. Not just software, but even the hardware was sealed to prevent modifications to the hardware in an age when upgrading and modding PCs was the norm. Over the past few decades there have been a lot of changes at Apple, but preventing user customization has been intertwined with their design-first philosophy. It seems naive to think they are doing anything but the minimal required action to maintain their hermetically sealed ecosystem.

scarface_74 3y ago

This makes absolutely no sense. It came out in the Eoic trial that 90% of App Store revenue comes from games and in app purchases. Those apps are no more going to leave the App Store and go to the web than they are going to leave the Google Pay Store. In app purchases monetize too well and people aren’t going to put their credit cards on every third party website. That’s not even to mention all of the ways that you can pay via in app purchases that you can’t pay via the web and all of the kids with phones without credit cards attached. If it’s only Apple, then why aren’t Android developers creating great PWAs to escape the same 30%?

afavour 3y ago
> Those apps are no more going to leave the App Store and go to the web than they are going to leave the Google Pay Store. ...Microsoft did exactly that, though: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/30/hands-on-xbox-cloud-gaming/ https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/30/hands-on-xbox-cloud-gam... I don't really understand the rest of your argument. "Of course developers aren't going to use the web instead of apps, it's a way worse experience!" is precisely the point in criticizing Apple letting the web platform languish. They have a vested interest in making sure the in-app experience remains superior to web experience because of their 30% cut.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  If it’s just Apple, then why aren’t developers leaving Google Play Services in droves to avoid the same 30% cut? And Microsoft did that not because they didn’t want to be in the store, but because at the time Apple wouldn’t allow them. Yes I disagree with this. If PWAs could be made one to one with apps - and today games like Candy Crush could be web apps - game developers who make up 90% of App Store revenue still wouldn’t give up the direct access to users wallets they get from in app purchases.
  - int_19h 3y ago
    If PWAs were on par with native feature-wise, why couldn't they have single-click in-app purchases? All you'd need is some large trusted platform to provide a single sign-on experience and process payments.

brookst 3y ago

I don’t think the comment you’re replying to was saying Apple’s PWA support was world-leading. I think it was saying that if Apple wanted to kill PWA it would have made more sense to just not make those investments over the past four years.

kelthuzad 3y ago
>I think it was saying that if Apple wanted to kill PWA it would have made more sense to just not make those investments over the past four years. wrong, Apple only started implementing the bare minimum because they felt the heat from devs & feared the legal consequences for their anti-competitive behavior. Apple still has the unquenchable desire to kill PWAs, they will just keep sabotaging them more subtly. Apple will keep up their shenanigans until the bitter end, but I hope that the EU will have none of it.
afavour 3y ago
Yes… and what I was saying in my response is that even if Apple did want to kill PWA there is good legal reason to have made the investments they have in the past few years. In court they can argue that app makers are free to make a PWA if they don’t want to pay the 30% cut. If they removed PWA support they’d not be able to make that argument.
nox101 3y ago
The cynical view would be that apple was only doing that to try staving off anti-trust litigation. The fact that PWAs are seriously crippled on iOS vs Android still seems certainly makes it appear Apple has ulterior motives. If you make PWAs not able to do everything a native app can do then you're incentivizing native apps. Apple wants everything to go through their store. (1) so they can ban anything they don't like. (2) they can get their 30% (can't get 30% of websites)
- agust 3y ago
  I'd say this is not a cynical view at all, rather a quite realistic one. They only added support for push notifications to iOS in 2023 (7 years after Firefox and 8 years after Chrome on Android), right after the UK regulator started its investigation in mobile ecosystems.

wolfendin 3y ago

“The competition” is just Google/Chrome. Unless there’s someone else?

afavour 3y ago
I don’t understand the relevance of that, why would it invalidate the point?

dwaite 3y ago

> Investing in PWAs for four years is only going to get you so far when you’re eight years behind the competition. Which non-Chromium competitors are you speaking to here? What are some examples of standards-track features that they implement that Apple doesn't?

afavour 3y ago
> What are some examples of standards-track features that they implement that Apple doesn't? Lack of any obvious method to actually install a PWA is probably the biggest blocker to PWA adoption today. They aren’t yet a web standard but citing standards always feels like a very convenient argument: there are a great many web features implemented by most browsers before they become standards. Multiple implementations are often part of the standardisation process. When iOS finally implemented Web Push they gated it to only apply to Home Screen installed apps and those who defend Apple lauded the decision. Yet there’s absolutely no mention of that behaviour in web standards. Apple, like every browser creator, takes web standards as advisory and implements the parts they want, in the way they want.