 Remember when I said you wouldn’t be able to test your web products on alternate browsers in Europe? Well guess what? You can’t see this Apple bug/feature outside of Europe either. https://www.macrumors.com/2024/02/08/ios-17-4-nerfs-web-apps-in-the-eu/ 25 comments
@simonharper @chockenberry Correct, they are not being included in the multiple app stores thing. And I cannot wait to hear the Brexiteers cry about being "stuck" with the App Store 🤣  @kDelta @chockenberry LOL - I for one won't complain, but i agree many will bleat on about how ‘unfair' this is, yet ignore the fact that they probably voted to leave the EU 🤷🏼♂️ Which, of course, will be a huge pain in the ass for Safari QA. Since it’s SIM locked, it won’t work in a Simulator and you need a special physical device. Bugs won’t get as much attention as a result. Another variation on reaping what you sow. @chockenberry I do wonder what Apple expects to get out of this, especially since existing (as in already installed) PWAs currently stop working too, basically becoming bookmarks again … which means all the on-device data stored by the PWA is probably gone?  @daniel @chockenberry this is likely due to the requirement of ‘equal’ capabilities afforded to other browsers. I suspect this is less ‘hahaha screw them! we hate PWAs!’, and either a time-thing (didn’t get to it) or a risk thing (api to do it would be abused by 3rd party browsers to fill your home screens with crap) @chockenberry I wonder if throwing a roaming eSIM could EU-ify an iPhone. Airalo’s US ones had been a resold Orange Polska one in the past. Apple is usually very smart about the web. They wrote and open sourced the engine that powers the web on every mobile device, after all. To see them forking the web in Europe makes me sad. When you lose the trust of web developers, you lose a lot. And I suspect that this is just the first case where this decision is going to bite them in the ass. They forgot that the first part of WWW is world.  @chockenberry I do wonder if the overriding aim is to make the experience as shit as possible in the EU, and then point to it while nodding vigorously at regulators around the rest of the world. Eradicating PWAs is beyond the pale – and at odds with Apple’s own thinking (eg web apps on Mac). I’m not sure where Apple thinks this ends, but it is burning through goodwill at a terrifying rate of knots.  @craiggrannell @chockenberry Firs of all, it's a vengeance pointed to the users, even if I'm not a massive PWA user, nor even a web apps advocate - I still use few of them, for example a niche local transport authority web-app to check location of vehicles and delays in real time 🤷♂️ @chockenberry they are just doing what they are forced to be EU. They can’t give Safari platform advantages on the web.  @jonathangulbrandsen @chockenberry They could allow other browsers to have the same access to platform APIs Safari uses, but they chose not to.  @chockenberry “They wrote and opened sourced the engine that powers the web” is not really accurate. WebKit was forked from open source KDE. @lapcatsoftware True. But they forked with an eye towards performance needed on mobile devices. In my mind, that was a new thing that no one else envisioned. @chockenberry I feel the same way. It seems pretty likely that most of these recent moves will play against them hard in antitrust trials. And their privacy line wouldn’t feel so hypocritical if the exact thing being asked for didn’t already exist for the Mac, and exhibit none of the supposed problems they’re wringing hands about.  @chockenberry this is a lot of hay made by web zealots over what seems to be just a beta regression. @janl That’s not really the point. The issue is that no one in the US can see it and decide for themselves. Or check for a fix in the next beta. Or come up with workarounds.  @chockenberry What do you think it would take to get this right in the eyes of law, users, and developers? @chockenberry If I've understood well enough, I'd guess Safari PWAs are being withdrawn to meet some requirement that third party browsers can have equal capability—otherwise why take the engineering burden of a behavioral difference? The best thing I think they're likely to do would be adding more BrowserKit APIs but that could just be out of this year's scope. |
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@chockenberry This one potential #Brexit benefit for us Brits. Assuming Apple class us as not EU now from a region point of view… it's possibly the only #Brexit benefit too.