New EU Regulation Gives Developers More Protection and Transparency in App Store Review

[madmin]

For the record, PWA are not the same thing as universal apps. They are simple websites with an extra JS execution thread called a service worker which allows for caching of code and content for off-line usage and push notifications. This has little to do with Electron or frameworks like React Native - which are famously bloated and slower than native apps.

On iOS you only have Safari webkit based browsers which limits access to PWA functionality found on all other platforms, thus favouring native iOS apps which have to be accepted by Apple's App Store.

 

[madmin]

web apps well duh access via a browser. No point in shaming Apple or its App Store when web apps are perfectly available in any modern browser right? What am I missingin your pint here?

I guess you're missing the point that only Safari webkit based browsers are available on iOS. Developers build PWA apps that work almost everywhere except on the iOS platform due to Apple not implementing standard browser functionality on iOS. This functionality is available on all other major platforms, including macOS partly because users have more choice elsewhere. Some say Apple's motivation for doing all this is to protect their App Store model. If so, that's probably anti-competitive behaviour which we know hurts consumers and in this case developers as well.

 

[DeepIn2U]

I guess you're missing the point that only Safari webkit based browsers are available on iOS. Developers build PWA apps that work almost everywhere except on the iOS platform due to Apple not implementing standard browser functionality on iOS. This functionality is available on all other major platforms, including macOS partly because users have more choice elsewhere. Some say Apple's motivation for doing all this is to protect their App Store model. If so, that's probably anti-competitive behaviour which we know hurts consumers and in this case developers as well.

safari is NOT the only WebKit browser available on iOS. If you’re referring to the only engine available then yes; you can still use another ‘wrapper’ like Chrome, FireFox, Brave etc.

how does it “hurt” customers ?

 

[revanmj]

Thats harder than it looks because Safari is really just a fancy wrapper on the Web UI View available to almost every other application on the SDK. I can see being able to update your iOS on unsupported devices being an option though - if Apple got people to agree to the limitations - but in a world where Android updates are far and few between for most people - Apple looks pretty good already.

Thing is, WebView engine was actually decoupled from Android few years ago and is now updated via Play Store independently of Android OS updates. So, many old Android devices can actually have web rendering engine with newer features and more recent security patches than Apple's from the same time.

Microsoft also works on WebView control that is updated independently of underlying Windows version (so it can be used even on Windows 7, which no longer has mainstream support for OS security updates). Though on computer OSes most devs already decided to include engines for webviews with their apps instead of using the ones built into OS, so that was less of an issue here.

So, it is technically possible, it's just Apple apparently doesn't see a problem with some their OSes (you can update Safari on macOS as far as I know) being monolithic brick that has to be updated as a whole instead of delivering updates directly to some of its components with different schedules.