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Ask HN: How does Apple legally exclude browsers from its App Store?

3 points by gardnr ↗ HN
How does Apple legally exclude browsers from its App Store when Microsoft got slapped with an anti trust suit for positioning IE above the rest?

Firefox extensions don’t work on iOS. Tor Browser can’t publish to the App Store. How is this different?

4 comments

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dave4420
1. Microsoft was found to have an OS monopoly (Windows) that they were found to be illegally extending into a monopoly on web browsers by bundling Internet Explorer. Apple has not been found to have a monopoly.

2. Apple does not exclude competing web browsers from their App Store. They exclude alternative web renderers and javascript implementations.

Re 1, the idea that an end user OS would be anything other than deficient if it wasn’t bundled with a web browser seems quaint. And honestly it was dubious at the time.

computator
> They exclude alternative web renderers and javascript implementations.

What's the rationale for that? If I were to take a wild guess, I'd say it's for security. Apple trusts their own implementation but they wouldn't want to be forced to review the security of other implementations because the code is huge and complex and it's so critical to user security. But I'd like to know if they've given an official reason.

dave4420
My understanding is that Apple (claim to have) optimised their implementation for energy efficiency, and feel that they would get the blame if using e.g. Chrome resulted in lower iPhone battery life, because users wouldn’t realise it was due to Chrome — all they’d know would be that they weren’t getting the advertised battery life.
gardnr
It would also cut in to their App Store revenue if Chrome was able to implement full PWA features.