iOS 17.4 Nerfs Web Apps in the EU

[AlmightyKang]

It’s a bit of a dick move but that kills more web apps is fine by me. I know this is not a popular idea but hear me out first before you hit me with a shoe or something.

I spent years architecting the things and quite frankly most of the use cases need to just go. Everyone say they allow you to break free from the chains of your platform. They don’t. They allow someone else to sell their own SaaS microplatform to you instead or hoover up your data in an easy centralised location. The UI’s are terrible and built on stacks of hacks and garbage which consume ridiculous amounts of energy and fall over all the time. Not to mention the security model is terrible to dire at the very best. And even the supposed offline ones don’t work properly offline. They are a net regression for application delivery and I wish people would stop saying they are the best thing in the universe. Have you seen a web developer after a decade of doing it? They are almost universally nervous wrecks and smoke a lot. The back end guys are crack smoking monkeys and the companies that build them are hiring the worst people they can and hoping you don’t sue them one day when all your personal data end up for sale by the gigabyte on some dark web forum.

Of course this can be replaced by Electron so instead of having a PWA or native web app they bundle the whole stack into a monolithic blob that is shipped to your computer to run alongside everything else and eat up your RAM and CPU because they are too damn lazy, cheap and stupid or their business model is so close to the line that a native app is going to ruin them. They all suck.

The web should be for content delivery only and we should have fully native apps that support occasionally connected scenarios on our devices. I’m almost entirely running like that these days and my life is much much much better for it. Everything is always where I need it and my security and data protection posture puts my personal data at significantly lower risk.

As for on device browser engines, this whole thing is going to turn into the mess like Android is. Your entire locked down device model is screwed the moment someone bundles a completely separate browser engine just to display a flipping about box. Yes I’ve seen that twice now… Urgh!

 

[BaldiMac]

and it's so childish. "it's my ball and i'm not playing anymore". i've never been so ashamed of owning an apple product. if this is the road they want to go down then i won't be part of it

Jumping to conclusions based on a beta is pretty ridiculous itself.

 

[krspkbl]

Jumping to conclusions based on a beta is pretty ridiculous itself.

yeah it's a beta i know things can change. if it's a bug then apple deserve more criticism.

 

[ifxf]

Just being petty. Don’t care for their users buying their high cost products.

 

[BaldiMac]

yeah it's a beta i know things can change. if it's a bug then apple deserve more criticism.

It depends on the reason. There could certainly be technical and security reasons that they are disabling web apps since they weren't designed to support multiple browser engines.

 

[krspkbl]

It depends on the reason. There could certainly be technical and security reasons that they are disabling web apps since they weren't designed to support multiple browser engines.

fair enough.

 

[Starfia]

At first read, that sounds very concerning. Apple's never treated Web Apps as first-class, but they've always supported them, and I've always thought that treating them as first-class would have been a good preemptive move with respect to all this current EU DMA business.

I sincerely hope this is just about navigating the letter of the DMA temporarily, but goodness knows we could use a proper statement and some significantly-better-than-anything-prior support and developer material that makes it unmistakably clear what the path is to creating a well-supported, standards-based HTML app for Apple platforms.

 

[Wagbh]

There are indications that iOS 17.4 is using SIM carrier information to geo-lock the changes to web app functionality singularly to users in the EU. Web apps in other regions around the world remain unaffected.

Article Link: iOS 17.4 Nerfs Web Apps in the EU

I'm curious about the actual implementation of this.
I use dual SIM, one is EU and the other non-EU...

This is gonna be fun...

 

[twintin]

1. it's not a dumb law 2. modern browsers have support for PWAs so it's a non issue.

PWA is still supported, its just how they appear and what access they have that has changed. How other engines behaves and runns on other platforms, I do not know.

 

[NagasakiGG]

With those anti-consumer actions I'll seriously consider Android when I'll be switching my phone in 3 years. I've been using iPhone since 4S. From my point of view those actions are a middle finger pointed at my face. So be it.

Ane yet there are still so many dumbs defending Apple…

@Wagbh Atm they do it via GSM. I made the test when I was in Basel (where you have Swiss, French and German signal) last week. My phone is purchased in Germany, AppeID is also German but my main carrier and therefore SIM is Swiss (Sunrise). As soon as I connected to Orange or SFR (France) it started to throw baguettes at me, and as soon as I connected to Telekom it started throwing Bratwurst. it will be interesting to see how they determine it on for example iPods, as they also use iOS, but have no modem (as iPadOS doesn't fall into that).
Same will be interesting on iPhones without SIM card inserted

 

[hans1972]

" by limiting the capabilities of PWAs and their ability to compete with native applications in iOS, raising questions about its commitment to supporting web technologies as a viable alternative to the ‌App Store‌."

Which I support.

The web should be for browsing and some lightweight tasks.

 

[Lounge vibes 05]

it will be interesting to see how they determine it on for example iPods, as they also use iOS, but have no modem

this doesn’t affect iPods at all, because the last generation hasn’t received a major software update since iOS 15

 

[cnnyy20p]

My wish of there having a truly universal standard system for applications. So we can use any OS we want…

 

[BC2009]

With those anti-consumer actions I'll seriously consider Android when I'll be switching my phone in 3 years. I've been using iPhone since 4S. From my point of view those actions are a middle finger pointed at my face. So be it.

Way to go Apple! Once again leading the way in petty absurdities. 

Yeah -- this is the fault of the EU. Not having Safari always as the "default browser" has meant that Apple cannot do the tight integration that they once did. They have to respect the default browser selection without giving Safari advantages that the other browsers cannot do. One casualty of this is that web apps that used to always run full-screen in Safari now have to run like they would any other browser and iOS needs to respect the user's default browser setting.

If you want to blame anybody for this, blame the EU over-regulation. This is why we cannot have nice things. When the next USB standard comes along it will be the EU who gets upgraded to it last because regulations will force Apple to maintain USB-C in the EU. So, to the citizens of the countries of the EU, cry to your politicians and tell them to back off because it is getting a bit ridiculous. Just wait until iMessage goes away in the EU because of regulation of chat apps.

For all the crying Tim Sweeny and Mark Zuckerberg do to get those EU regulations enacted to force Apple to do things, these 2 CEO's are far worse than Tim Cook's Apple in putting the screws to competition. Sweeny wants to run his own App Store and by his own description it would more draconian and monopolistic than Apple's and Zuckerberg is charging like 47% commission on sales made in digital goods in his virtual reality "meta verse". So glad the EU listened to these guys and regulated Apple.

 

[Cunir]

Tried web apps a few times but you cant use the Aa text resizer on them… i dont think i could even use my fingers to zoom in and make them bigger. And text on a lot of websites these days is too small for my eyes to read. So i gave up with them. Could have been a nice idea, though

 

[coolfactor]

More monopolistic practices. Now, I know what you are thinking, Apple is not a monopoly. Then it can only be that Apple is a bully with a bad attitude.

Web Apps must use a rendering engine, but in a full-screen mode with a dedicated session, cookies, etc. To date, this was done with a secondary WebView component powered by WebKit. It was separate from
the Safari browser and built into iOS.

Now that alternative browsers are mandated, they would each need to offer this secondary Web App support in addition to the standard browser.

My first reaction was that Apple was being a d*ck, but further research shows it's a much more complex technical issue.

PWAs are an important technology, and this is likely just a temporary pause in support until they can figure out how to have universal browser support.

 

[ILoveCalvinCool]

I remember Apple's low point, when they nearly went out of business and were seen as the good guys fighting the good fight against powerful entities like Microsoft. Back then, Mac fans rooted for our scrappy fighter. Now, Apple is Microsoft and Mac/Apple fans root for Apple to crush the opposition by any means available.

 

[coolfactor]

Tried web apps a few times but you cant use the Aa text resizer on them… i dont think i could even use my fingers to zoom in and make them bigger. And text on a lot of websites these days is too small for my eyes to read. So i gave up with them. Could have been a nice idea, though

Same as you can't pinch-to-zoom ordinary apps... web apps tried to adhere to that. It wasn't a flaw in the tech, just user expectations. Need to think of web apps less as websites, and more as applications. It would be up to the developer to ensure a great user experience.

 

[9081094]

The greediness of Apple has no limits. I wish they were as focused on innovating and bringing superior products/services to market as being greedy.

 

[Halopend]

This reeks of laziness as opposed to maliciousness.

Basically, there is no hooks for third party browsers to provide a system side rendering engine, so adding a PWA to the home screen technically wouldn’t meet the legal requirements of alternate browsers (by some definitions at least).



Now…..word on the street has been safari only supports the bare min of the PWA feature set to basically force devs to use the App Store (i tried researching this once but it didn’t actually seem as bad as I expected based on how some devs talk).

If that is true though, being forced to add third party rendering engines for PWAs would likely scare the hell out of them as they would lose control of all the little things they can do to force people into native apps (and thus platform lockin) would be gone and devs who want cross platform compatibility would just make PWAs.

Hard to say.

 

[BaldiMac]

Tried web apps a few times but you cant use the Aa text resizer on them… i dont think i could even use my fingers to zoom in and make them bigger. And text on a lot of websites these days is too small for my eyes to read. So i gave up with them. Could have been a nice idea, though

Pinch to Zoom works for me in the MR Forums app. Web Apps also respect the Page Zoom settings in Safari, so you can set a higher zoom for any sites that are giving you trouble.

 

[RigSatMe]

Nice! Please Apple continue...

 

[Samplasion]

eh those Web App Push Notifications have never worked for me anyway. Not even Macrumors supports it

I may have touched something in the settings for Safari but MacRumors notifications work for me on iOS 17.3.

 

[Samplasion]

Another money grab by Apple. Hopefully the EU will stand up against such abuse.

I don't disagree with you but I think this may actually be a side effect of under-the-hood changes. That's unless this isn't fixed by iOS 17.4 RC anyway

 

[nistromo]

Ha its like cookie prompts all over again - if only they could be restricted to the EU!