Have you tried a browser on a TV? It's not a particularly enjoyable experience.
I do it all the time. And you're right; it is a terrible experience. However, it opens up content that isn't available in any other way.
Also, UIWebView classes aren't just used for viewing web pages. They're used for things like:
- Showing a service's Terms of Service
- Providing flexible user interfaces that can be updated without recompiling the app
- Showing many types of mobile advertisements
- Executing JavaScript code for providing an updatable glue layer between your UI and the underlying code, or for supporting custom plug-ins.
and so on, depending on the app. It is quite possible to design a remarkably native-looking user interface in a browser view. The apps that are most likely to need this are things like Netflix and Amazon apps, where they need to be able to update categories, provide new custom artwork, new types of pages, etc. on the fly based on content provided by servers. You can kind of do that without using a web interface, but it is a
lot more work, a
lot less flexible, and provides no real benefit other than satisfying the whims of purists.
No, removing UIWebView was IMO a big mistake, and I very much hope Apple will fix it in a subsequent software update. It makes porting of some apps unnecessarily complex, and could also be seen as an anticompetitive move because of its impact on mobile advertising. It just doesn't make sense unless you're stuck in the 1990s mindset of a web view being used only for viewing web pages.
And even if it were used exclusively for web pages, the sensibility of the decision would still be arguable. After all, there are plenty of great opportunities for integration between TV content and the web, such as providing links from a movie description to the IMDB page for the movie. If done correctly (with appropriate CSS and layouts designed specifically for viewing on a TV), such features would be eminently usable, and they are basically impossible without web views.