alt Hacker NewsApple never hid the fact that their apps work better on their devices. They have access to APIs that third parties do not have.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing necessarily.
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As has been evident in many spheres of human activity recently, being brazen about conflicts of interest, is often used as a PR shield for those conflicts.
Sometimes transparency and honesty get weaponized. Especially by actors with centralized power.
(Not arguing against transparency, but against misinterpreting it as always being used in good faith.)
What makes it a "bad thing" if competitors have equal access? May the best implementation win.
Isn’t the EU regulation specifically about this?
I think it's bad.
You want to handle device rotation smoothly in your in-app browser?
Tough luck, WebKit's _beginAnimatedResizeWithUpdates is private, and only Apple gets to use it in Safari.
Good luck with the animation and scroll position handling. You better hope WkWebView's default behavior works for you, because you don't get to customize it and fix edge cases or the tab previews, like Apple did for their browser.
I do think it's a bad thing and I believe the EU regulators agree.
There are whole classes of applications that are not possible unless low level device data is exposed via APIs.
And since Apple doesn't provide the apps, the apps won't exist until Apple creates them.