
Apple is bad news for the future of the Web - zwetan
https://medium.com/@richtr/apple-is-bad-news-for-the-future-of-the-web-6027b000b0c4
======
drewcrawford
What if I told you there was a valid technical reason not to allow alternate
browsers on iOS?

If you're on a Mac, paste this into Terminal:

    
    
        find /Applications/ -perm +111 -type f |while read fname; do otool -L "$fname" | grep WebKit && echo "$fname"; done
    

With those results in mind (500 binaries for me, if you're not in the habit of
blindly pasting things into terminal), ask yourself the following questions:

1\. What percentage of these vendors do I trust to rapidly respond to zero-day
attacks in their embedded browsing engine?

2\. What percentage of these applications have I updated in the last year?

3\. What percentage of these vendors do I want to grant the authority to
download arbitrary untrusted internet code, compile it to machine code, and
jump to it? This is what all modern JS engines do, and (other than system
WebKit) absolutely forbidden on iOS.

4\. Given that applications _can_ ship "homegrown" WebKit on OSX, what
percentage of programs I have installed actually do so, instead of linking
/System/Library/WebKit.framework? And what does that say about the real demand
for special browsing engines?

Every rant I read about how "the web is in bad shape" jumps straight into
conspiracy theories about Apple the monopolist (somehow with 30% US
marketshare) without solving, addressing, or even _mentioning_ the actual
technical issues.

If you're a person who does not like the way things are going, you should A)
talk to people on the other team to discover what is the real, legitimate,
technical concern behind our position, and B) work with us on finding
solutions to that issue, and C) go out for beer afterward.

Characterizing Apple as some villain "locking up untold billions in economic
value" for prioritizing security over software freedom accomplishes nothing
beyond creating animosity between engineers who share many of the same goals.

~~~
bendbro
It appears these restrictions haven't done a great deal to stave off exploits.

[http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/31/software-with-the-most-
vul...](http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/31/software-with-the-most-
vulnerabilities-in-2015-mac-os-x-ios-and-flash/)

~~~
drewcrawford
The citation doesn't shed any light on whether the restrictions have been
effective.

It does shed light on Darwin having more overall vulnerabilities than Linux
and less overall than MS, but unless you believe that browser policy
specifically dominates These figures, (and can support that view) the overall
vulnerability count is not relevant to browser policy.

~~~
bendbro
Also wanted to come back and note that this data doesn't indicate whether bugs
were found and patched internally, or were actually exposed first by malware.

I was wrong to make a judgement on it.

------
rashkov
Interesting, but it seems to ignore that there is quite a stiff competitor in
Android, yet Apple users are not exactly jealous of their Android toting
friends. No killer apps taking advantage of next generation html5 APIs. That's
the real problem in my opinion. When that changes, then Apple will follow
suit.

~~~
saurik
One doesn't put the effort into building a website if it will only work on
Android: you sigh and use a framework like Cordova that provides not even just
the same functionality across platforms but with a consistent API, which you
then compile into two applications. Even if all Apple did was support their
own web push notification system from Mac OS X on iOS I imagine you would see
many many more web apps instead of native apps.

------
FussyZeus
To say that a company with 13% (down from 16%) market share is holding an
entire industry back is laughable on it's face. The thing holding web apps
back from widespread adoption is the fact that web apps are by and large awful
to use, slow, and completely 100% dependent on your Internet connection at all
times by their very nature.

I have a strong feeling the future is indeed in web apps, but first they need
to stop inventing a Shiny New Thing every 2 months and actually fix some of
the crap out there now, and then we need a stable Internet infrastructure upon
which to rely on.

Edit: Thought of this later on, ironically enough the only machine I will use
any web apps on (and have to actually) is my Macbook, seems to be the only one
that can run them in a pleasant way.

------
bottled_poe
Ah, yes, the web - the platform of tomorrow, but never today. I personally
don't like the idea of running insecure/inefficient code, which is the current
web situation. Web developers can change the code at any time without me
knowing. Why must I agree to allow random code to run on my device?

------
dangjc
I'm starting to be pessimistic on iOS. At first there was so much innovation
in games but now developers are finding it hard to deliver compelling non-
freemium games with buyers not willing to pay much money up front. Infinity
blade didn't usher in a whole generation of AAA games. The nvidia shield looks
like it's doing a better job of that. And doing some web development now, I'm
really annoyed by ios lack of microphone support in webkit.

------
mozumder
Good. The web is for documents.

Please keep apps away from it.

~~~
otterley
That ship sailed a decade ago.

------
zaro
Sounds like safari on iOS is the new internet explorer.

~~~
kevincox
Really just Safari in general.

Apple has show some progress lately though so I'm just hoping that they were
caught sleeping with the forking of Blink.

------
SiVal
Apple has to maintain a balance. High iPhone sales times high margins per
phone are the future of Apple for years to come. Their other businesses, large
as they are, are mere sideshows for now at Apple, because of the outsized
success of iPhone. The only competition to iPhone now is Android, and Android
margins are generally dismal. Apple has to somehow hold out against that
competition without resorting to lowering their own margins, and the only
thing that makes that possible is a reputation for being "so much better".

The Web's importance as a platform is high, so the reputation of iPhone as a
Web client is part of the reputation that supports iPhone's excess margins
(over Android). They _must_ maintain that reputation in the general consumer
market. Consumers have a sense of what the Web currently can do (things based
on older features), and iOS Safari needs to be rock solid at supporting that,
but it doesn't have to support things the Web _could potentially do_ as long
as the market isn't even aware of that potential.

And how would they be? We developers won't build anything that won't work in
an iPhone. Apple knows that, and they put their _what could be done_ mojo into
their native APIs, showing off how much better it is than the limited features
of the Web. And Safari can limit what people think is possible on the Web as a
whole by limiting browser capabilities on iOS, confident that developers
wouldn't dare use any Web feature that wouldn't work on iOS.

But if developers started building things at the margin that had more powers
on an Android phone than on iOS without committing business suicide, the
perception in the market could begin to be affected: "Android browsers support
all of our features, and iOS users can either use the features supported by
Safari or download our native app from the App Store to get full support for
all the features [...that Android users get automatically from a better
browser...].

After seeing a couple of those messages, the mainstream media might start
picking up the sense that iOS Safari is not delivering on the full potential
of the Web and spread the word, which Apple would have to counteract.

Of course, for this "counteraction" to come in the form of additional feature
support in Safari, Chrome browsers on Android really _would_ have to be
better, and there is some reason to believe that they aren't yet. In other
words, maybe they "support" more features than Safari but the features they
"support" don't work very well. In that case, it would make sense for Apple to
fight back using their own Web apps demonstrating (on stage) the "superiority
of iPhone for the Web" instead of improving Safari.

But if Chrome could get its act together and developers would push the edges
of features that were supported everywhere on the Web but iPhone (and required
native in iPhone), it could cause enough of a change in perception in the
market to get Apple to incorporate more Web features into Safari, enabling the
whole Web platform to move forward.

Just as market changes forced MS to initially create a great browser to
compete with Netscape for "best Web support", then let them use later versions
of IE to put their foot on the brake, and then were forced to let go of the
brake and compete again, the same market forces seem to be driving Safari and
can be used to get Apple to get off the brake and back onto the accelerator.

------
gsmethells
Security is completely ignored here. Is a web app controlling your microphone
or camera a Good Thing? Maybe yes, maybe no.

~~~
bendbro
In what way? As with the microphone and GPS, chrome prompts the user with
whether they want to give the website access.

I could see a need to be able to run a web app in a sandbox mode though, where
it has only ephemeral access to storage and no access to the Internet.

