
Coinbase Wallet to remove DApp browser to comply with Apple's policy - EGreg
https://old.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/egjseg/coinbase_wallet_app_removing_dapp_browser/
======
Sargos
Apple and Google have complete control over the mobile market which is the
dominant way humanity interacts with the internet in today's world, especially
in developing countries. Having a policy which forbids arbitrary things like
listing other apps for users to interact with is very dangerous as it
effectively bans whole industries from competing on a level playing field.

This is a big problem for cryptocurrency especially as mobile web browsers
cannot interact with blockchains and so users are forced to use custom apps
that implement the web3 interfaces. This effectively bans wallets from
providing a good experience to allow users to interact with dapps and since
you can't fall back to using a web browser on mobile it might end up being a
total ban on the use of dapps on mobile platforms unless each dapp makes their
own app (which just opens a whole new can of worms).

I'm not really sure what the solution is here but something really needs to be
done before it becomes a ceiling for dapp adoption. Perhaps the answer is
government regulations mandating open access to mobile platforms which is
looking more likely each year as the investigations into big tech are ramping
up but I'd rather see mobile Chrome get extension support so people can at
least fall back to metamask. I don't see that happening though. This will be a
fun war over the next decade but I'm hoping for the best.

~~~
pentae
Cue the "But I like Apple running the app store with an iron fist! No malware
and viruses!" comments. Unless the government forces Apple in the future to
permit sideloading, this is never going to change.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _Unless the government forces Apple in the future to permit sideloading,
> this is never going to change_

Granted. Convince me this is an issue best solved by a law specifically
regulating side loading?

~~~
anfilt
Well what else do you propose since iPhones comes with essentially a hard
coded PC equivalent of secure boot that you can't disable. You can't even load
your own keys onto the device and sign your own software or OS. At which point
you don't even own the computer since you have limited say as to the software
you can run on it.

I don't see Apple planning to stop restricting users rights anytime soon. Same
applies for phone manufactures who sell android devices.

~~~
Terretta
At what point does a PC become an appliance?

We don’t force appliance makers to allow side loading. We don’t enforce car
makers to support engine warranties if you re-chipped your ECU. There seems to
be no “user right” to receive ongoing support at manufacturer expense for a
thing the user meddled with outside of parameters.

Along the ‘convince me’ lines:

1\. Convince me the iPhone is not an appliance competing in a marketplace of
appliances.

2\. Convince me the market cannot decide what it wants this appliance to be
able to do or not do.

3\. Convince me a maker has no right to decide what user actions may void its
future obligations to the user.

~~~
inimino
> Convince me a maker has no right to decide what user actions may void its
> future obligations to the user.

That's a completely different thing. This is a question of a manufacturer
having complete control over what the buyer can do with the device. There is
no "click here to void your warranty and enable root" button, if there was
this would be a different conversation.

------
awinter-py
yeah only wechat is allowed to have their own app store

[https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/07/wechat-mini-
apps-200-milli...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/07/wechat-mini-
apps-200-million-users/)

~~~
infecto
Lets be honest. Its the same for Alipay's app too. They both are their own
ecosystem and they are going to be allowed without a doubt, if Apple was to
touch either of these Apps it would be seen as an offense to the red flag and
I could easily see the mainlanders boycotting it.

~~~
sdan
And could potentially leak into foreign politics.

------
yladiz
As this post doesn’t explain what a DApp is, for anyone curious it seems to be
a “decentralized app”. I’m not sure how they work, or what the benefit of them
are, but I guess they’re like apps-within-apps, kind of like the mini apps in
WeChat (someone more knowledgeable please chime in).

~~~
saurik
On a desktop computer by far the most common "dApp browser" is MetaMask, which
is merely a Chrome/Firefox extension. The mechanism is simply "a web browser"
that gives the web page the ability (via some injected JavaScript object) to
"request an Ethereum transaction be executed" (which costs money to do, and
might even simply be the transfer of money). If it were possible to make
browser extensions for MobileSafari people likely wouldn't bother making
entire replacement browsers, as the experience is categorically worse.

Alternative browsers--built using Apple's browser--exist on the App Store; the
issue here is that users are paying for something via a mechanism that isn't
in-app purchases: Apple wants all payments in the world to flow through them,
and so the idea of a decentralized payment future is incompatible with the App
Store.

~~~
cdiddy2
Wouldn't they remove regular Bitcoin and ethereum wallets too if they were
trying to control payment flows

~~~
saurik
As far as I can tell, they model those apps like banking apps, or Venmo, or
PayPal, which you will note are all also allowed. However, they model stuff
you do with these dApp browsers as direct payments for a service. Apple has a
rule in their App Store review guidelines that if you sell something, you must
do it via in-app purchase.

~~~
newnewpdro
And yet you can purchase things in conventional e-commerce using a web browser
on an iphone without Apple getting their cut.

How is this any different?

~~~
saagarjha
E-commerce presumably falls under “physical goods” in Apple’s eyes, which is
allowed.

~~~
newnewpdro
Which seems rather arbitrary, it's not like you can't buy digital goods from
Steam over the web.

This is yet another reason we must fight these proprietary app walled gardens.
It's a clear regression from the open web.

~~~
m-p-3
For a while, you couldn't have Steam Link on iOS because it would be "bad" for
Apple if you did buy a PC game through a live stream of your desktop.

[https://9to5mac.com/2019/05/15/steam-link-ios-
launch/](https://9to5mac.com/2019/05/15/steam-link-ios-launch/)

------
swiley
Why is the iPhone so often associated with innovation? It’s always the thing
that prevents innovation and substitutes banks (ultimately) manipulating
individuals.

~~~
latchkey
If you ever tried to develop software on phones before the iPhone, you'd
understand. A buddy and I developed a pretty cool 'Cocktail App' for the
Danger Hiptop.

After many months of frustratingly going back and forth, we were not able to
get it onto the Hiptop app store because the carrier (T-Mobile) did not want
to be responsible for someone using a recipe to make a simple bar drink and
then going off and killing someone. They eventually added a 21+ category and
we still couldn't get it onto the store. Never mind the fact that someone
could just use the installed web browser to view the same exact content.

Of course you'd think that we should have known that we might get rejected...
but the issue was that Danger couldn't even talk to the carrier until the app
was written and they could physically show it to them. So it was one of those
things where we knew the app might get rejected, but we took the risk anyway.
It was a good learning experience.

So yes, this weird stuff around getting software onto phones has been going on
for a long time. Apple was one of the first to take the control away from the
telco. I don't know if that is better or worse, but it changed the economics
substantially.

~~~
giancarlostoro
> So yes, this weird stuff around getting software onto phones has been going
> on for a long time. Apple was one of the first to take the control away from
> the telco. I don't know if that is better or worse, but it changed the
> economics substantially.

The legal burden is no longer on the telco's but on Apple in this case.

~~~
latchkey
Correct. At the time, there was no way to even talk to the telco. All
communication had to go through a single person at Danger who was overloaded
with their job and barely had time to respond to people who were not
guaranteed to make it into the store. Luckily I had friends that worked at
Danger and could help a little.

It took a while and went through a lot of growing pains, but at least now,
Apple has the financial resources to hire staff to respond to support tickets.
If we are comparing literal apples to lemons... I'd much rather deal with
someone at Apple than someone at a telco.

------
dang
Url changed from [https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/51693/coinbase-
wallet-...](https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/51693/coinbase-wallet-to-
remove-dapp-browser-to-comply-with-apples-policy), which points to this.

------
loourr
All distributed apps should be built for the desktop first. Everything else
will be censored.

~~~
Acrobatic_Road
There's nothing stopping you from throwing a DeFi interface on a local web
server. Built for web doesn't mean web exclusive.

~~~
loourr
That's true, but it's just more difficult to distribute.

~~~
Acrobatic_Road
You're right, it is inconvenient. There are some desktop dapp browsers such as
shadowlands (supports uniswap and makerdao) but nobody is really using these
(yet).
[https://github.com/kayagoban/shadowlands](https://github.com/kayagoban/shadowlands)

------
throwGuardian
Apple taking giant craps on less powerful companies, is becoming routine.
After all this publicly available information on their behavior, if the
supreme Court sides with apple on app store policy, I think we'll have Google
and Microsoft immediately pivoting to this model of fingering developers and
end users

------
ssalka
I remember hearing about this portion of the App Store policy before - where
"mini app stores" are essentially banned. Can anyone link to this specific
portion of the policy? Curious to see what it actually says.

~~~
saagarjha
The language around this changes constantly and currently says something about
not emulating multi-app widget experiences.

------
PunksATawnyFill
It would be helpful if the post explained what this is and means. What is
"DApp browser?"

------
McTossOut
Remember when Microsoft sued OpenOffice for building a functional free
competitor? Or when Sun sued Python?

I feel it's time to ramp up support for Ubuntu Touch.

~~~
Fnoord
> Remember when Microsoft sued OpenOffice for building a functional free
> competitor? Or when Sun sued Python?

They never did. They never did.

Both companies did some evil things in the 90s and 00s (Microsoft arguably
_much_ worse than Sun) but not what you described here. There were some
worries from words that Microsoft might sue OpenOffice users. Sun never sued
"Python" (you cannot sue a programming language, for starters).

..and why specifically Ubuntu Touch? There are other FOSS options available.
Ubuntu Touch never took off, and is now a community project. Even Windows
Phone failed. I put my money on Sailfish OS as platform #3 (if we ignore
KaiOS) which is partly FOSS. Why SFOS? Because it will get adoption in non-
Western markets such as Russia and India. Countries don't want to be dependent
on US proprietary code because it isn't auditable, and these companies in the
end do what the US government asks or demands them to do. I'm also curious
what is going to happen with the Chinese Android fork led by Huawei.

~~~
K0SM0S
Sailfish is definitely my next phone OS, and even though walking away from
Google / Apple tentacles is one incentive, by far the biggest for me is that
it runs Linux, complete with terminal etc. Oh the joy of just being able to
grep, rsync, ssh...

I always felt like that wasn't a lot to ask, but evidently, I couldn't be
further away from the truth.

~~~
panpanna
What do you feel about the pinephone?

~~~
K0SM0S
I haven't looked much into it yet, but I really, really like what they do with
Pinebooks. Heard only good things about them. Looking at the announced
specs[0], the phone is very promising to me.

I'll probably wait for a general release (apparently the "Brave Heart" edition
is for devs and very-early adopters). It's definitely on my radar.

[0] pine64.org/pinephone/

