We do talk to the browser vendors. The bundle ID one by itself ensures it's unviable project. That's why 15 months in, there are no alternative browser engines in the EU.
Thanks so much! it’s been a four-year journey just to get this far, and none of it would have been possible without the volunteers who donate their time just for the belief in a better future for the web! Will be passing this comment on!
1. If you use either "Safari" or "Chrome" on iOS, then Apple gets paid. That's 97% of the market on iOS.
2. Many of those games could be rewritten in WebGPU/WebGL2.. if it saved them 30% appstore tax, and the install process was decent and they had frictionless payments, they'd move.
3. Because Apple is the primary target market, and if you've already built native for iOS, what's the advantage of doing web for Android if your not making the cost savings of only having to build one app. 70% of Desktop usage is now the web/web apps... that tells you what's possible if browsers can compete.
And it can’t just be the woefully insufficient TestFlight 10k users because there are possible upwards of a million developers who need to test their websites/web apps in the EU.
Install and discoverability is still hidden. Push is gated behind install. Safari’s scroll bugs haven’t been fixed despite us extensively documenting them, emailing to Safari’s leadership and raising them every year as the number one bug.
The number one thing we’ve asked for is third party browser engines on iOS.
Author here, this was supposed to be when the user installs a new browser it has the option to call an OS api to ask the user if they would like to set the newly installed browser as the default.
This could have reasonable anti-spam protections built in. We’re planning on expanding this in more detail.