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If (as many people have suggested) Apple's intention in suddenly devoting significant resources into PWAs (after completely ignoring them for years) was to avoi

If (as many people have suggested) Apple's intention in suddenly devoting significant resources into PWAs (after completely ignoring them for years) was to avoid app store regulation, it makes perfect sense that when they failed to stave off regulation in the EU Apple would no longer have a motivation for investing into them within the EU. Additionally, even if Apple is still looking at PWAs as a way of staving off regulation in the EU, it still makes perfect sense that Apple is running a cost-benefit analysis on PWAs being open to other browsers. PWAs on iOS are significantly limited even after Apple's increase in support. Supporting PWAs just well enough to stave off regulation while keeping them locked down so that other browsers can not extend them or push capabilities further is entirely in Apple's interest. ---- My take is that Apple as a company would prefer not to be working on PWAs at all. But that's not really an option, because both the EU and the US are looking at regulating the app store. The next best option is to have PWAs be a serviceable but ultimately inferior option for offline-only and privacy-preserving apps (and in fact many of the APIs Apple supports are entirely unusable for offline-only apps, although to be fair that's probably more Google's fault than Apple's). Apple may very well have thought the option of a semi-supported but ultimately inferior, controlled PWA experience was off the table in the EU; or they thought that with the app store opening up they could get away with killing the platform for EU users entirely. In either case, they now seem to believe they can keep PWAs locked down to only support Safari capabilities. Maybe they're right, I'm sure Apple has more access to regulators to ask these questions than anyone else here does. And so none of this is incompatible with the notion that Apple wants to kill PWAs. The idea that a company can completely ignore a technology for years and years and years, and then suddenly out of the blue as soon as regulation gets suggested start pouring resources into their browser and openly arguing in court, "see, you don't need to regulate us, we have a browser" -- and we're supposed to believe that this means that Apple is suddenly on board with the technology and that they don't have ulterior motives or that their motives wouldn't shift back if the threat of regulation went away. That is just silly. Apple has had literal years to both clarify with regulators what the browser regulations would mean and to build APIs for PWAs that Microsoft and Google have been perfectly capable of creating. And in light of their last-minute scrambling, the most likely and reasonable interpretation is that Apple thought they could get away with killing off PWAs now that they were no longer useful for avoiding app store regulation, a bunch of people screamed about it, regulators reached out, and suddenly Apple had a (partial) change of heart. Note, of course, Apple has no timeline or plans or announcements about when (or if) PWA APIs are going to stop being 1st-party privileged and exclusive to Safari, despite the fact that Apple has known that this regulation would be coming for multiple years. Which does seem to conflict a little bit with the narrative that Apple is all-aboard with PWAs as a technology and that they've been investing into them as a long-term strategy or commitment to the web, but what do I know? --- But I really, genuinely do not see what the past 4 years prove other than that Apple's motivations about the web can change on a dime the moment that regulation enters the picture. And I think that's really revealing, and I think it says something about Apple's commitment to the web that it took the threat of regulation to make them care at all about the web as a platform, and I think it really says something about Apple's motivations that the moment that regulation went through anyway, Apple suddenly reverted back to its previous stance on PWAs and was comfortable throwing all of the PWA investment of the past 4 years out the window. I very honestly do not understand how people can look at these series of events and say, "this proves that Apple cares about the web." We're looking at the same timeline, but it's like you're reading it in a different language than I am.

shuckles 3y ago
The DMA was passed many years ago (January 2022), before the cited investments in PWAs. So if Apple was acting to proactively stave off regulation, you have a big hole in your theory of causality. The web is more than a Chromium app runtime. We are commenting on the web without any of the random features Chrome builds because they are strategically invested in ChromeOS, and their user data harvesting business model relies on more clients sharing more data with Chrome and Google. Apple’s interest in the web cannot be gauged by how much they support technology funded and evangelized by a bunch of current and ex-Googlers that has little to do with open exchange of information. Conflating it is a strange rhetorical trick.
- danShumway 3y ago
  > The DMA was passed many years ago (January 2022), before the cited investments in PWAs. So if Apple was acting to proactively stave off regulation, you have a big hole in your theory of causality. I'm not sure I do? The DMA was passed in January 2022. In that entire span of time when Apple was actively arguing in court that PWAs were an alternative to the app store, at no point did they ever consider building out a proper security model for PWAs that didn't rely on the assumption that Safari would be the only supported browser. You're saying that Apple learned about the DMA before they started looking at PWAs seriously, then we got to February 2024 and suddenly Apple was caught flat-footed about browser requirements? That doesn't make sense: either they knew about the DMA and their current lack of PWA security models are an active decision that purposefully complicated compliance with the DMA, or Apple somehow wasn't thinking about the DMA in which case it's kind of silly to say that it disproves anything about their apparent web strategies. This is a situation where the excuse makes Apple seem more suspicious, not less. Apple knows in 2022 that the DMA is coming. In February 2024 out of the blue they announce that they're shutting down PWA support. If that's not strategic, it's at least wildly incompetent. And I don't think that Apple is wildly incompetent -- I think that announcement was strategic. > So if Apple was acting to proactively stave off regulation I'll also note that this is not a theory, Apple is actively arguing in the US that PWAs mean that it shouldn't be regulated. I don't really understand the contention here, the way I see it Apple is saying that PWAs are a proactive strategy to stave off regulation. We can disagree about their motivations beyond that regulation, about whether they would consider dropping support in the absence of regulation, but it is just a fact that Apple started investing more heavily in Safari around the same time that regulation arguments started popping up in both Europe and the US, and it is just a fact that Apple has proactively put forward PWAs as an argument in court cases as to why it shouldn't be regulated. Is it really that weird to connect those dots? ---- > Apple’s interest in the web cannot be gauged by how much they support technology funded and evangelized by a bunch of current and ex-Googlers Apple's support and advocacy for PWAs is pathetic even ignoring Chrome's support. It's not like Chrome has good PWA support, the entire notifications API is obviously designed by an advertising company with zero real input from any stakeholders other than advertisers. Ideally, investment from Apple into the PWA ecosystem would mean not leaving the entire PWA specification to be written entirely by an advertising company, it would mean proactively getting involved in the process. It would mean asking questions like, "aside from Google, who on earth does it benefit that notifications have to be triggered by a remote server and can't be scheduled locally?" The state of PWAs is as much a story about the apathy of every other company besides Google as it is a story about Apple holding back on basic support for extremely needed features like reliable offline storage. I'm not giving Apple credit for sitting back and twiddling its thumbs while Google ruins the spec, and then turning around and saying, "you can't expect us to implement these features, the proposed specs are terrible." Yeah, of course they're terrible, where were you while Google was ruining them? I'm surrounded by people arguing that Safari is some kind of final bastion against Chrome hegemony, but in practice Apple does nothing with that bastion. They let Google make all the decisions, and then use that as an excuse to offer middling browser support. I'm not giving them credit for that. I'm not talking about exposing web usb support, I'm talking about things like: is it possible build an alarm clock as a PWA? I'm not asking Apple to bow to Google's every demand, I'm asking them to act like they're a stakeholder in the web and to give even one single damn about whether it's possible to build privacy-respecting offline webapps. Apple's apathy towards influencing or pushing the PWA web standards process in a productive direction is just as much a problem as their apathy towards supporting obviously beneficial capabilities like icon badges. Apple defers power to Google and then uses that as an excuse for further inaction.

shuckles 3y ago

The DMA was passed many years ago (January 2022), before the cited investments in PWAs. So if Apple was acting to proactively stave off regulation, you have a big hole in your theory of causality. The web is more than a Chromium app runtime. We are commenting on the web without any of the random features Chrome builds because they are strategically invested in ChromeOS, and their user data harvesting business model relies on more clients sharing more data with Chrome and Google. Apple’s interest in the web cannot be gauged by how much they support technology funded and evangelized by a bunch of current and ex-Googlers that has little to do with open exchange of information. Conflating it is a strange rhetorical trick.

danShumway 3y ago
> The DMA was passed many years ago (January 2022), before the cited investments in PWAs. So if Apple was acting to proactively stave off regulation, you have a big hole in your theory of causality. I'm not sure I do? The DMA was passed in January 2022. In that entire span of time when Apple was actively arguing in court that PWAs were an alternative to the app store, at no point did they ever consider building out a proper security model for PWAs that didn't rely on the assumption that Safari would be the only supported browser. You're saying that Apple learned about the DMA before they started looking at PWAs seriously, then we got to February 2024 and suddenly Apple was caught flat-footed about browser requirements? That doesn't make sense: either they knew about the DMA and their current lack of PWA security models are an active decision that purposefully complicated compliance with the DMA, or Apple somehow wasn't thinking about the DMA in which case it's kind of silly to say that it disproves anything about their apparent web strategies. This is a situation where the excuse makes Apple seem more suspicious, not less. Apple knows in 2022 that the DMA is coming. In February 2024 out of the blue they announce that they're shutting down PWA support. If that's not strategic, it's at least wildly incompetent. And I don't think that Apple is wildly incompetent -- I think that announcement was strategic. > So if Apple was acting to proactively stave off regulation I'll also note that this is not a theory, Apple is actively arguing in the US that PWAs mean that it shouldn't be regulated. I don't really understand the contention here, the way I see it Apple is saying that PWAs are a proactive strategy to stave off regulation. We can disagree about their motivations beyond that regulation, about whether they would consider dropping support in the absence of regulation, but it is just a fact that Apple started investing more heavily in Safari around the same time that regulation arguments started popping up in both Europe and the US, and it is just a fact that Apple has proactively put forward PWAs as an argument in court cases as to why it shouldn't be regulated. Is it really that weird to connect those dots? ---- > Apple’s interest in the web cannot be gauged by how much they support technology funded and evangelized by a bunch of current and ex-Googlers Apple's support and advocacy for PWAs is pathetic even ignoring Chrome's support. It's not like Chrome has good PWA support, the entire notifications API is obviously designed by an advertising company with zero real input from any stakeholders other than advertisers. Ideally, investment from Apple into the PWA ecosystem would mean not leaving the entire PWA specification to be written entirely by an advertising company, it would mean proactively getting involved in the process. It would mean asking questions like, "aside from Google, who on earth does it benefit that notifications have to be triggered by a remote server and can't be scheduled locally?" The state of PWAs is as much a story about the apathy of every other company besides Google as it is a story about Apple holding back on basic support for extremely needed features like reliable offline storage. I'm not giving Apple credit for sitting back and twiddling its thumbs while Google ruins the spec, and then turning around and saying, "you can't expect us to implement these features, the proposed specs are terrible." Yeah, of course they're terrible, where were you while Google was ruining them? I'm surrounded by people arguing that Safari is some kind of final bastion against Chrome hegemony, but in practice Apple does nothing with that bastion. They let Google make all the decisions, and then use that as an excuse to offer middling browser support. I'm not giving them credit for that. I'm not talking about exposing web usb support, I'm talking about things like: is it possible build an alarm clock as a PWA? I'm not asking Apple to bow to Google's every demand, I'm asking them to act like they're a stakeholder in the web and to give even one single damn about whether it's possible to build privacy-respecting offline webapps. Apple's apathy towards influencing or pushing the PWA web standards process in a productive direction is just as much a problem as their apathy towards supporting obviously beneficial capabilities like icon badges. Apple defers power to Google and then uses that as an excuse for further inaction.