alt Hacker News>Even so, conflating "Safari is holding the web platform back by not implementing standardized web features" with "Safari is holding the Google platform back by not implementing non-standard Google features" is kind of disingenuous.
You missed the point completely.
Apple >forbids< any browser engine on iOS other than their own Safari. So you can't just install Chrome on iOS, because when you do you get Safari instead.
I would not care how Apple cripples their own web browser if they didn't force other browsers on iOS to use their browser engine. They are forcing me to write a native app instead of just tell my customers to install Chrome to have access to the APIs my product needs (web bluetooth).
I am not an iOS app developer, I'm a web developer. I don't have the resources to support that kind of code when I already have a perfectly working web app on the competing platform. I also do not plan to sell anything through my webapp, which is why Apple wants to force developers to create a native app, where they can collect 30% (or whatever % it is now) of anything sold through the app.
It doesn't matter what the standards are or aren't. Apple are just being greedy assholes and what they are doing is absolutely worse than what Microsoft did to get sued in an antitrust case when they simply bundled IE in Windows.
And to make it worse, Apple is on the board that decides what standards get into W3C, so they are blocking useful APIs based on their own greed.
This is part of the reason Apple is currently being sued by the DOJ
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline
Replies
> They are forcing me to write a native app instead of just tell my customers to install Chrome to have access to the APIs my product needs (web bluetooth).
Why don’t you encourage them to get an Android? What makes you think that people who prefer an iOS device over Android would even install Chrome after you nag them with dark patterns?
> I also do not plan to sell anything through my webapp, which is why Apple wants to force developers to create a native app, where they can collect 30% (or whatever % it is now) of anything sold through the app.
Sorry, not following you: Apple is forcing you to give them 30% of nothing? How exactly is that a problem?
> Apple are just being greedy assholes and what they are doing is absolutely worse than what Microsoft did to get sued in an antitrust case when they simply bundled IE in Windows.
Yes, how dare Apple look after their [checks notes] customers by preventing devs from using the features that would most annoy their customers?!? Such a greedy thing for a company to do, to give customers what they want! The only true purpose of a company ought to make it easy to slurp up customer data and monetize eyeballs!
Mobile safari is arguably the only thing standing between Google and total browser dominance. It's the reason why Google "only" has roughly 75% of the mobile browser market even though it has a 90% market share in desktop. I'm principally against the idea that Apple can prevent users from installing the software they want on their own devices, but we can't deny that it's better for the health of the web.
Anyway, if you want to exclusively argue "Users should be able to install the browser they want", that's fine. But you're not; both your comment and the pwa.gripe page brings up how Apple is "crippling" their own web browser. Since you use the same wording as pwa.gripe, I assume you too view the lack of non-standard Google-only features as "crippling mobile Safari". I disagree.