I suppose this will yield a real-world test of the EC's enforcement powers. To my understanding, they have little unilateral power--their legislative powers are limited to initiative (not a paltry power, but not a unilateral one either) and its enforcement power seems to consist of taking cases to the ECJ.
Yup, the EC can do pretty much what it sees fit when it comes to competition issues. It's not a good idea to challenge them, as Facebook and Google have already learned. Guess it's Apple's turn next.
Both can be true. If what you did before doesn't work now and potentially drops your storage, the explanation doesn't matter. It could be a planned improvement in theory. It still broke things for people - literally dropped support for some PWA that mattered to people.
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
> Sites that had some PWA information provided - such as an iOS icon - would be added as PWAs even though they weren’t. They have tightened up things so that only sites that are explicitly configured as PWAs will be added as such.
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.
Ok, let’s follow your line of reasoning a bit: Why will Apple bother to even continue shipping their own browser engine?
You claim they only do it protect the App Store monopoly… so if users will just download something else, what would be the point? The things you want them to add (what you claim makes them uncompetitive to Chrome) completely defeats the alleged purpose of supporting their own engine. So why would they pay engineers to work on that? It’s nonsensical, magical thinking.
I seriously hope you will reflect on the real negative consequences of what you are doing to the web. This isn’t one of those times when you can just stick your head in the sand and repeat the mantra “I’m just typing code”.
Once Safari is killed, Google can really start ramping up the war on Firefox because the collective market share of non-Chrome browsers will be too small to matter. You are killing the open web that you claim you want.
If Apple has to force WebKit on every iOS browser for it to stay afloat, then something is wrong with WebKit.
I do agree that Chromium overtaking the web is bad for the open web in general. I don’t agree that forcing Apple to allow third party browser engines is going to make that problem worse.
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.
> 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.
Firefox maintains an unimpressive ~3% market share according to this [0]. Why do you believe they'd have a thriving mobile browser if not for Apple? Is it not more likely that Chrome would just dominate iOS like it does everywhere else?
You completely sidestepped their criticism of Google’s Chromium dominance, which will only be exacerbated by Chromium engines being able to enter the last bastion Google needs to conquer: iOS.
I’ll leave in the middle any value judgment on whether that warrants blocking other engines. Still, it must be pointed out that you sidestepped it and then held up a shiny new topic before pulling a whataboutism.
> 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.
And yet, they did invest in Safari and specifically in supporting web apps. So, what was the incentive? Or are you going to follow up your cynicism with something along the lines of “they want to evade regulation”?
> 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.
Talk about a poor take.
This is not true. Since Jen Simmons joined Apple in 2020, Apple has made considerable strides in improving Safari and WebKit and added significant support for web apps.
They’ve consistently scored high on the annual Interop score, if not outright lead the pack at the top, and every update continues to add heaps of improvements.
Your choice to name-drop OWA to produce a fallacious argument from authority followed by poor takes ensures I won’t bother taking OWA seriously when it’s mentioned in the future.
Google managing to use their search monopoly to win a browser monopoly isn't a reason to let Apple continue its own anticompetitive practices as some kind of crazy check-and-balance: it is a reason to ALSO break apart Google.
No: the real problem is people like you who would rather defend Apple's anticompetitive practices--leaving Apple (or, at best, an oligopoly formed by Apple/Google) their own world dominance which I guess you just want to ignore for a moment--than to also fight to stop Google's; the correct thing to do now is to first celebrate this win and then immediately begin working on similar (or even stronger) attacks on Google's monopoly with the momentum, not insist that no one should be allowed to make progress against Big Tech because any first battle one choose to fight might cause a different front elsewhere to destabilize :/. #GoogleIsNext
If that moment ever comes, the damage will already be done. All those dim-witted web developers will only support Chrome, and your data will belong to Google. People who supported this have been useful idiots.
Tone it down. Some people believe you can challenge the anti-competitive behavior of Google and Apple (in any order, including tackling the Apple problem first), and that you don't have to choose the lesser of two evils. It's a perfectly reasonable opinion. You're welcome to disagree, but it doesn't mean the people you're disagreeing with (including EU regulators) are a bunch of blithering "useful idiots". Regulators have taken down larger monopolies than Google before. See for instance the breakup of Bell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
Users JamesRLandrum and "spense" are the same person. He even shared his own tweet above (so it is not random :)
He writes to create noise. He has no clue or experience about PWA. He shared his own tweet above :)
If you want to disprove the claim, the tweet needs to say, "I live in the EU, have the update installed on my phone, and I just successfully installed this PWA."
This is thoughts and prayers, not a counterexample.
All of the PWAs on my iPhone running 17.4 will now open in Safari instead of in fullscreen, and iOS itself warned me the first time I opened a PWA from the home screen after installing 17.4 that iOS will now open all „linked websites“ in the „configured default browser“.
They’re obviously trying to prevent companies from bypassing their extortion proposal in response to DMA by simply offering a PWA to users that can work around the „core tech fee“..
Such a backwards viewpoint. Just because normal people don't know about it yet, doesn't mean it can't work in the future. Needs a bit of re-training and possibly a couple bigger apps going full PWA.
I’m as big of a PWA advocate as any, and even I don’t think this will ever happen. PWAs are the most user-centric app platform, but it’s not conceptually intuitive to the average user. For that to change, PWAs need a strong marketing push. I don’t see anyone stepping up to do that.
I'm a long-term Linux user and started buying Apple products long ago. I still keep my iPhone 4S around because I think it's a piece of art. I think the hardware and physical design of Apple products is really great.
When I heard about this new EU regulation, I started to consider retiring my iPhone. I developed my own iOS app, but I'm unable to run it permanently because I need to get it approved by Apple to install it on my own device. PWAs are an alternative I was considering, and I'm also using some from others.
If this is true. I'll switch to Android. The only device I'd keep using actively is the M1 MacBook because it's running Asahi Linux and I haven't booted into MacOS for months now.
Feels like it's constantly improving. I'm running it since 1.5 years. Battery life is much better now. It even supports TLP (with the AUR version).
Hard to tell what I'm missing currently. But I'm using rather basic tools in the command line and all these work fine. Of course Firefox works. Inkscape, Darktable, TexLive, too.
Looking at the site, it looks like it still doesn't support USB-C displays or Thunderbolt, which unfortunately, for me, is a dealbreaker (I use my MBA with a Thunderbolt dock on my desk). Looks like I'll still have to wait for a while.
I bought an iPhone last year. I started regretting it after 3 months of usage. Trivial things are a burden to set up, like:
- custom ringtone;
- emulators;
- lock screen rotation in landscape;
- listen to music from local storage without an Apple subscription;
I could go on and on. Most of them have solutions, but again, a burden to configure compared to an Android device. My next smartphone will be Android, once again. I just wish small smartphones were more common and had battery life comparable to Apple's.
I bought a second hand MacBook Pro 2015 to use Linux on. I'll let Asahi cook a bit more before moving to an M series.
I stood in line on launch day in June 2007 for the first iPhone, and used one exclusively until 2022 when I started running it side-by-side with a Pixel running GrapheneOS.
I personally tried it with Apple Music and it did not work if you had no connectivity — and, in fact, because about half of the app itself appears to be loaded on demand, parts of the UI were non-functional as well.
Also, it was not possible for me to download the equivalent of my Discover Weekly playlist for use offline; it HAD to be streamed for each. and. every. play.
I gave up and went back to Spotify. A few months later, I wiped the iPhone and sold it, leaving me with GrapheneOS exclusively.
Just last night I wiped the storage of my last Mac and it will be given away.
Given the direction Apple is going, I made the right call, which is a damn shame.
I am in the same boat and I suspect a lot of the early hour Apple users are in a similar process of thinking about it.
Some of the main draws of Apple were the freedom of the platform as a whole and the total cost of ownership that was much lower than the price tag would suggest at first.
Nowadays not only do you pay for the privilège of locked down hardware but the software is very often "meh" at best, when it's not completely trash compared to the alternatives. And their push to everything subscription with the inability to both upgrade/repair the hardware easily makes the price tag unpalatable. They aren't better built than many expensive options nowadays...
Most of the current Apple software works well only if you want to pay for content, for your own stuff the softwares are rather lacking which makes the base offering uninteresting and since 3rd party software has become extremely expensive in the ecosystem it truly is a luxury platform.
In the end, there is nothing that is better done on Apple's ecosystem nowadays, most of their historical advantage have evaporated and arguing about the battery life of Apple Silicon seems like splitting hair considering the overall cost...
A few months ago, I asked Siri to play a specific song from my iTunes library. I've done this successfully many times before, but this time it misunderstood which song I requested. The song it thought I asked for wasn't present in my library, but it was present in Apple Music. Without asking for confirmation, it enrolled me in a trial subscription and begin streaming.
My guess would be that Apple is trying to blackmail some large software company inside the EU. And after careful consideration, they noticed that threatening to wipe all of their apps data of all Apple devices will do.
If my theory is correct, we will soon see a large EU software company - which deployed PWAs in the past - mysteriously start supporting Apple in their refusal to open up to alternative App Stores in the EU.
They will talk about security and user choice, while completely ignoring that the EU is merely asking Apple to treat them as well as China. In China, Apple has already been allowing 3rd party app stores for some years.
For what it's worth, I used to be a proud Apple user. But recently, I can't help but imagine the financial incentives behind their every move.
A lot of companies in the EU only survive due to government grants, so I'm not sure apple will be successful on this one. They are trying a USA strategy on EU soil.
But they wanted to use a native app, submitted it to the AppStore, Apple said no and Xbox had to go the PWA way. And now Apple reversed that decision for all regions, so Xbox are free to submit it again.
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
They added support for it in iOS 16.4, but websites can access it only when they are added to home screen. Thus, no home screen access means no Web Push.
Maybe you have a fine native calendar app available to you on your platform that you trust. Great, good for you. Maybe you have a messenger app on your native platform that you trust. Good for you, we are happy for you!
To use that to say the web shouldn't have a capability is incredibly cruel. Other users have corporate controlled systems and school laptops and terminals at public library. These users have next to no power, but the web is a common baseline for humanity that does serve & help everyone. It should have this capability, be possible to do this thing.
If this feature annoys you, don't use it. Turn it off. This is the web: get an extension that blocks Web Push requests preemptively. You as a web user have a user agent at your back that is flexible & configurable in how you browse the web. Just telling people they can't have a feature because In Your High Opinion It's Bad takes so much. Other people should have the liberty too. The web should have features, not cater to those who insist on its withdrawal from spaces they carve out.
That's why I'm against it: Whenever I look at my dad's computer or phone, he has a lot of spam notifications from I don't know where.
It's even an avenue for scam, as there are the multiple "Your device is infected" notifications...
I'm not against web tech being able to send notifications, but allowing every site to ask for permission (when people just don't read and click anything) is a nightmare.
Apple's solution there is pretty good: You can have web push if you want to treat this site as an app
Web Push Protocol was designed very much to preserve privacy as much as possible. Accepting a push has basically no consequences if you never click on anything. Yes they know it's you if you do click.
I would be flabbergasted & shamed if you could come up with a single example of this ridiculous forxed-adoption slippery slope happening anywhere on the web. This paranoia against the web is everywhere, and it's rotting people's fucking brains.
I work in company with 100+ PWA users where we had to buy cheap android phones because iOS PWA support is non-existing and every update makes PWAs worse.
Native app is not possible, app stores rules do now allow to publish our app.
We had "the most powerful and advanced smartphones" (TM) iPhones first, but Safari is always running out of memory.
But now with 150 eur Android phones, there are no more memory issues...
I had to look this up: PWA stands for Progressive Web App and according to web.dev is “a webapp that uses progressive enhancement.” On iOS you can install a PWA using the “Add to Home Screen” function.
93 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] threadDoes the ECJ grant the EC injunctions?
The court systems do exist as an appeals mechanism, but my impression is that they pretty much never overrule the EC on competition issues.
https://x.com/jamesrlandrum/status/1755411290107863429
> Sites that had some PWA information provided - such as an iOS icon - would be added as PWAs even though they weren’t. They have tightened up things so that only sites that are explicitly configured as PWAs will be added as such.
https://x.com/JamesRLandrum/status/1755411290107863429?s=20
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.
You claim they only do it protect the App Store monopoly… so if users will just download something else, what would be the point? The things you want them to add (what you claim makes them uncompetitive to Chrome) completely defeats the alleged purpose of supporting their own engine. So why would they pay engineers to work on that? It’s nonsensical, magical thinking.
I seriously hope you will reflect on the real negative consequences of what you are doing to the web. This isn’t one of those times when you can just stick your head in the sand and repeat the mantra “I’m just typing code”.
Once Safari is killed, Google can really start ramping up the war on Firefox because the collective market share of non-Chrome browsers will be too small to matter. You are killing the open web that you claim you want.
I do agree that Chromium overtaking the web is bad for the open web in general. I don’t agree that forcing Apple to allow third party browser engines is going to make that problem worse.
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.
Firefox maintains an unimpressive ~3% market share according to this [0]. Why do you believe they'd have a thriving mobile browser if not for Apple? Is it not more likely that Chrome would just dominate iOS like it does everywhere else?
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
I’ll leave in the middle any value judgment on whether that warrants blocking other engines. Still, it must be pointed out that you sidestepped it and then held up a shiny new topic before pulling a whataboutism.
> 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.
And yet, they did invest in Safari and specifically in supporting web apps. So, what was the incentive? Or are you going to follow up your cynicism with something along the lines of “they want to evade regulation”?
> 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.
Talk about a poor take.
This is not true. Since Jen Simmons joined Apple in 2020, Apple has made considerable strides in improving Safari and WebKit and added significant support for web apps.
They’ve consistently scored high on the annual Interop score, if not outright lead the pack at the top, and every update continues to add heaps of improvements.
People in the industry who can see past the trite “Apple bad, Safari sucks” mantra also acknowledge this: https://www.threads.net/@syntax_fm/post/C22hyslOABy/
Your choice to name-drop OWA to produce a fallacious argument from authority followed by poor takes ensures I won’t bother taking OWA seriously when it’s mentioned in the future.
This is thoughts and prayers, not a counterexample.
They’re obviously trying to prevent companies from bypassing their extortion proposal in response to DMA by simply offering a PWA to users that can work around the „core tech fee“..
When I heard about this new EU regulation, I started to consider retiring my iPhone. I developed my own iOS app, but I'm unable to run it permanently because I need to get it approved by Apple to install it on my own device. PWAs are an alternative I was considering, and I'm also using some from others.
If this is true. I'll switch to Android. The only device I'd keep using actively is the M1 MacBook because it's running Asahi Linux and I haven't booted into MacOS for months now.
Hard to tell what I'm missing currently. But I'm using rather basic tools in the command line and all these work fine. Of course Firefox works. Inkscape, Darktable, TexLive, too.
How's battery life compared to macOS?
This isn’t the case anymore. If using Expo you can also do it through EAS Build.
https://developer.apple.com/help/account/manage-profiles/cre...
https://docs.expo.dev/build/internal-distribution/#22-config...
- custom ringtone;
- emulators;
- lock screen rotation in landscape;
- listen to music from local storage without an Apple subscription;
I could go on and on. Most of them have solutions, but again, a burden to configure compared to an Android device. My next smartphone will be Android, once again. I just wish small smartphones were more common and had battery life comparable to Apple's.
I bought a second hand MacBook Pro 2015 to use Linux on. I'll let Asahi cook a bit more before moving to an M series.
That this is a burden to do is straight up false. Playing from local storage works the same as it did since the days of the iPod.
I personally tried it with Apple Music and it did not work if you had no connectivity — and, in fact, because about half of the app itself appears to be loaded on demand, parts of the UI were non-functional as well.
Also, it was not possible for me to download the equivalent of my Discover Weekly playlist for use offline; it HAD to be streamed for each. and. every. play.
I gave up and went back to Spotify. A few months later, I wiped the iPhone and sold it, leaving me with GrapheneOS exclusively.
Just last night I wiped the storage of my last Mac and it will be given away.
Given the direction Apple is going, I made the right call, which is a damn shame.
Some of the main draws of Apple were the freedom of the platform as a whole and the total cost of ownership that was much lower than the price tag would suggest at first.
Nowadays not only do you pay for the privilège of locked down hardware but the software is very often "meh" at best, when it's not completely trash compared to the alternatives. And their push to everything subscription with the inability to both upgrade/repair the hardware easily makes the price tag unpalatable. They aren't better built than many expensive options nowadays... Most of the current Apple software works well only if you want to pay for content, for your own stuff the softwares are rather lacking which makes the base offering uninteresting and since 3rd party software has become extremely expensive in the ecosystem it truly is a luxury platform.
In the end, there is nothing that is better done on Apple's ecosystem nowadays, most of their historical advantage have evaporated and arguing about the battery life of Apple Silicon seems like splitting hair considering the overall cost...
> I wasn't able to find 'nonexistent' in your Apple Music library. Search on Apple Music or ask for it on a different app.
The wording is confusing, but Apple Music library in this context means local. It doesn't enroll me to anything.
I wanted to flesh this out some more.
If my theory is correct, we will soon see a large EU software company - which deployed PWAs in the past - mysteriously start supporting Apple in their refusal to open up to alternative App Stores in the EU.
They will talk about security and user choice, while completely ignoring that the EU is merely asking Apple to treat them as well as China. In China, Apple has already been allowing 3rd party app stores for some years.
For what it's worth, I used to be a proud Apple user. But recently, I can't help but imagine the financial incentives behind their every move.
Doesn't make sense to be "forcing" them.
This is just Max’s viewpoint and others in the thread who are actually in Europe have confirmed it works for them
I’m in the EU on the latest version of iOS.
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
So your statement isn’t accurate
Maybe you have a fine native calendar app available to you on your platform that you trust. Great, good for you. Maybe you have a messenger app on your native platform that you trust. Good for you, we are happy for you!
To use that to say the web shouldn't have a capability is incredibly cruel. Other users have corporate controlled systems and school laptops and terminals at public library. These users have next to no power, but the web is a common baseline for humanity that does serve & help everyone. It should have this capability, be possible to do this thing.
If this feature annoys you, don't use it. Turn it off. This is the web: get an extension that blocks Web Push requests preemptively. You as a web user have a user agent at your back that is flexible & configurable in how you browse the web. Just telling people they can't have a feature because In Your High Opinion It's Bad takes so much. Other people should have the liberty too. The web should have features, not cater to those who insist on its withdrawal from spaces they carve out.
The astroturfing on this site has gotten incredible since the Reddit meltdown.
This is a much needed feature. Currently, we are riddled with terrible app notifications because the options are so limited.
Bring back the web as the front of the internet, and put native programs(a word I miss, by the way) back where they belong, in my control.
Like when people play dumb pretending that the sole use case for notifications is ads?
I'm not against web tech being able to send notifications, but allowing every site to ask for permission (when people just don't read and click anything) is a nightmare. Apple's solution there is pretty good: You can have web push if you want to treat this site as an app
Your same argument was used by javascript advocates back in the day "if you don't like it, disable it."
Have you tried browsing the web without it these days? Most sites, which just display text don't work.
That is why I am so aggressively against this crap. Web developers have proven they can't be trusted, to not abuse these features.
I would be flabbergasted & shamed if you could come up with a single example of this ridiculous forxed-adoption slippery slope happening anywhere on the web. This paranoia against the web is everywhere, and it's rotting people's fucking brains.
Burger menu -> Share -> Add to Home Screen
Works fine.
Apple then allowed other browsers also to add sites to home screen. If it is not PWA, then it opens in default browser.
Native app is not possible, app stores rules do now allow to publish our app.
We had "the most powerful and advanced smartphones" (TM) iPhones first, but Safari is always running out of memory.
But now with 150 eur Android phones, there are no more memory issues...
Probably APIs for adding sites to the Home Screen slipped in the development time and is coming later
Let us count the years until they understand the mess they are creating right now...