I’m sure Apple’s world-renowned UX team can innovate a way to allow new search engines to be added w/o bricking your phone. I’d rather have that than lack if real, capital-laden competition in search.
I’m not sure they can: adding “one more feature” here and there quickly overrides anything a UX team can do to prevent 10s of thousands of confused complaints and returned phones.
For example, my family member is a smart woman and I used to teach professionally. I haven’t yet found a way to teach her what a web browser is and isn’t.
This is relevant to the things she wants to get done (e.g. shortcuts don’t run in webview, gmail’s native app doesn’t support recipient groups but the web app does, etc)
After warmup, examples, Socratic questioning, task assignments, checking understanding and testing (with detailed feedback), it seems she approximately learns what a web browser is and when she is and isn’t in one, but then she doesn’t really understand it a couple days later.
She’s otherwise as clever and capable as everybody else or rather more clever.
At Apple’s scale, every added feature to a web browser adds thousands of clever people quitting in confusion.
That’s why they hide things like search engine selection under menus an average user will never see, even if accidentally pressing 37 not-quite-randomly wrong things during a session.
We here have the curse of expertise.
The best Apple UX can do for the majority of the population is say no to features more often than yes, and to hide deep under the hood any setting that persists after the device is restarted and could lead to confused angry consumers that can’t figure out what to do and don’t have nearby family members to solve it before they quit.
It is likely more that the Safari team anticipates non-scrupulous companies taking advantage of an option to add a default search engine inline. Things like modal prompting and site-specified explanatory text are exploited these days.
Likely the best bet would be a web extension manifest value to expose a potential search engine. That would mean on iOS that you still need to publish an app for your search engine option to show up.
