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.
Apple has single-handedly killed off mobile web apps from being viable on both iOS and Android, have deprived Firefox billions of dollars of revenue and strangled every other browser out of the most valuable marketplace. They do this why taking 20b/year from Google.
Apple is the one that has cost Firefox. Otherwise they’d likely have a thriving mobile browser which would have taken off because of extensions years before the competition.
Apple is not the defender of the open web, they invested the bare minimum into Safari to the point it was full of bugs, completely unreliable to build anything but basic websites, and was lacking all the core features required to compete with native apps. They were not competing with chrome on any platform except for on MacOS.
The only reason they have increased investment recently is because of the threat of competition.
Are you on 17.4 beta 2? If so I’ll have more questions.
People have been saying it's working for them in the EU: the Apple's detection is complex and seem to take into account different parameters, like the ios region, but also the origin country of the sim card used.
But note this behavior only occurs if you are in the EU and you are using 17.4 beta 1 or beta 2
This person is incorrect and doesn’t know what he’s talking about. You need to look at the full video of it action to realize the difference in behavior from 17.3 and 17.4 beta 1 and beta 2
That's a poor take. The issue is that because there is no browser competition on iOS, Apple doesn't need to fear losing market share. That in turn ensures they have no reason to invest in Safari or web apps.
Apple has the staff and the budget to make a decent browser and to ensure web apps work, they don't because they don't want anyone competing with their AppStore or their 20b/year google search revenue.