As I'm looking at the vision pro and try to envision what I could with it, when I think of developing a new app for it, those kind of extreme hostilities come to my mind now.
It just shows they don't care, they are releasing a whole new platform right now and at the same time show one of the most abusing attitude to developer I think we have rarely seen.
Apple app store condition were already overreaching but this time they really went the extra length with every single of their DMA adaptations.
That's not at all the case. Apple does care, a lot. It's just that their interests are not perfectly aligned with yours (or most developers).
The issue is that Apple needs 3rd party developers because a platform without apps has little value. However, there are so many developers on iOS that individuals have almost no leverage. Thus Apple invests their resources into the fattest part of the curve (developers of highly monetized games, mostly) because it gives them the best returns. It's not economical for them to focus on the elite developer's highly specific needs.
The reasoning here from Apple seems reasonable to me to be honest - they’ve gone into a surprising level of technical detail, quite interesting. I suspect many in this thread are commenting without actually reading their argument.
Its not honest. PWA has the same functionality as standard web app. You still need to grant permissions like Microphone Access, Camera access. Only difference is that a PWA has a manifest which defines appearance, splash screens, localization. Here's the starbucks PWA which is one the most popular PWAs.
> You still need to grant permissions like Microphone Access, Camera access
"including isolation of storage and enforcement of system prompts to access privacy impacting capabilities on a per-site basis"
One scenario is that today there is one instance of WebKit owned by the Home Screen process shared amongst all of the PWA apps which is enforcing that prompt. With third party engines that prompt would appear for the first app invocation but not any subsequent ones.
This is only an issue with PWA since for normal apps the browser process is per-app rather than shared.
Now they could rewrite the Home Screen execution environment to support one engine per app but their argument is that it's not worth their effort.
Try comparing that pwa to the native app and you'll soon find that most navigation ends up with quasi browser bars that obstruct the UI and slow the experience down.
Apple surely does this on purpose to prevent PWAs from being useful. Can't let any App store competition arise.
The reasoning can at the same time be technically correct ("we would have needed to allow Firefox and other browsers to provide homescreen PWAs as well in our read of the DMA, and that would have been somewhat annoying") and highly motivated by business interests ("oh, I guess you'll have to develop native apps now and pay us a CTF for them").
On iOS you can't disable functionality in that way.
Objective-C allows dynamic dispatch to private API methods which would be just fine to do on third party app stores.
As I mentioned above the issue is likely related to engines being able to cache the system prompts approvals across multiple PWAs effectively bypassing them.
The third-party browser could just have its own prompt until Apple delivers their API, no?
On macOS, I already have to both grant Firefox permission to access camera, and then Firefox asks me about every website trying to access it individually, using their own UI.
Did you read my comment? You still need to grant the permission to the browser in the first place.
This isn't any different from how it works already for all kinds of apps: If you grant Zoom the permission to access your camera, you do that once, and have to trust it on a per-call basis to not turn on your camera without your explicit consent.
If you don't trust your third-party browser to respect your choice as to which websites you want to grant access to your sensitive data, you probably shouldn't be using it, or at least not grant it access to that data in turn.
How would websites get access to your contacts? Just don't grant access to your contacts to your browser, whatever it is, problem solved!
The same applies to photos. iOS even has an API to let you pick a single photo to upload/share with an app that doesn't grant any access beyond that. And for messages there isn't even an API in the iOS sandbox.
Maybe you could clarify your concern; as far as I understand it, nothing whatsoever is changing on iOS due to the DMA in this regard (and I wouldn't want it to).
I think the concern/problem is you might want a pwa to have access to contacts, but you don’t want to provide contact access to the entire browser in this scenario since you may not trust the browser/other websites.
Could they not have created a API browser vendors could implement, and the user can select in the settings app which implementation they want to use for running PWA's? With the default implementation being whatever the user selected for their default browser?
For example Apple has `UIWebView` and `JavaScriptCore`. They could have abstracted the implementation so PWA's run in like a `UIHomeScreenWebAppView` which requires a protocol `IWebView` and `IJavaScriptEngine`.
Implementations could delegate OS integration tasks back to the operating system. For example notifications.
The technical approach and legwork is already done with React Native.
I can appreciate that Apple has put in a lot of thought into this but it seems like they are not following the spirit of the DMA laws. And I can understand why.
The issue is isolating each PWA from each other and giving permissions per site, for example, camera. Right now, a single instance of Safari is the only thing enforcing that. If you swapped Safari out for Chrome, that isolation is gone. If one PWA has camera access at the OS level, all of them have it.
People want to do whatever they please on iPhone, but also expect Apple to create all the appropriate interfaces to accommodate them basically for free.
Apple has already done that for decades with macOS and its predecessors. The OS and its programming interfaces were always just included with the hardware purchase. Occasionally they would charge for a major OS upgrade, which Apple could always bring back if they can't survive without the app store tax revenue.
iPhone costs ~$1000, with the highest profit margins on hardware plus AppStore out of any phone maker = for free lol.
Is this astroturfing HN loves to provide Apple for free? Apple fans will go out of their way to white knightly defend a trillion dollar company who can easily afford do implement any regulatory challenge, gaslighting you for having the audacity to hold Apple accountable to a high standards, as if they're some broke 3 person start-up scraping behind the couch cushions for money, when Apple is absolutely minted with the GDP of an entire country.
The customer buys the hardware and the developer pays for a license to use api, sdk or whatever to access platform features. Game consoles, windows, processors. Yea maybe you can write your own stuff, but if you want access to those features, someone has to pay somewhere (no, I don’t think the hardware fee covers those costs). Software has got to be the only space where people think development time costs nothing and everything should be free.
And I don’t get why people who don’t like the Apple way care so much. There’s an alternative that’s more open. Go build your utopia there, if the lack of barriers makes it so easy.
do you think that ~25% fees on every in app transaction ( Total is 30% but 3% is used for credit card transactions.) is maybe too much to cover these software development costs?
A counter to this would be game store sites like Steam have in 30% fees but steam doesn't have a monopoly on the games store. Apple has a monopoly on the app store.
Apple has been taking a lot of actions within the last year against the developer community:
1) Retaliations in the anti-competitive lawsuits against Apple in US (surrounding fees) :
* You must request an entitlement now from apple to link to an external payment provider in app. You must still give apple a 27% even if you use external payments.
* If Apple feels a lack of compliance with the entitlement program they have the right to look through financial books and bill for if they think their cut was missed.
2) Retaliations in the anti-competitive lawsuits against Apple in EU (surrounding fees) :
* PWAs. PWAs were starting to become a form of protest for developer to get around Apple's closed source system. PWAs don't utilize Apple's SDKs. Sure Apple may have some points surrounding the technical inefficiencies surrounding PWAs but it is suspicious that these rules have taken place during these lawsuits.
3) Beeper
* Everything going on with Beeper enforces the point that Apples wants to have a stranglehold on their monopoly
Optional 4) The insane markup of the Vision Pro relative to competitors. Making it difficult for devs to test new products.
All of these exemplify Apple's use of their monopoly on the individuals who support their ecosystem (developers). There is strong consumer demand for Apple so their is a strong incentive to develop with Apple. Being an early-stage founder myself I am finding it very difficult to convince myself that developing on Apple for proving product market fit is the way to go.
These rules are hurting the smaller developer teams who can't afford to pay these fees and can't pay for a compliance guy in the beginning to look over Apple specific polices. PWAs being canceled is just another example of Apple over-using their power to hurt the little guy.
On the contrary, in my experience it’s far more common that Apple haters will go out of their way to hate when it’s completely unreasonable. I can think of many such occasions in recent history.
The iPhone 15 starts ar MSRP 950 Euros in the EU or close to 1000 USD.
And the Pro base model starts at 1200 Euros and the Pro Max base model starts at 1440 Euros, 20% and 40% more than my Original estimation. There's also the cheaper models you can buy.
What's your point with this? Or do you just enjoy taking things super literally and spinning them into strawmen?
Make whatever excuses you want for posting misinformation. I am simply stating that your facts are wrong. I didnt build the strawman, you did when you used the cost of the iphone for the basis of your post and that cost was inaccurate.
>Make whatever excuses you want for posting misinformation
By misinformation you mean using logic and pricing information directly from Apple's German store?
The one misinformed is you my friend. Please get help. The iPhone doesn't have a single fixed price but comes in many varieties at many price points, many well above 1000 bucks some below. I just picked an average price that seemed reasonable and not super high.
Here in the UK, updates for the first iPhone were free, but (in the beginning) the major updates for the iPod touch used to be paid for.
(Unless you downloaded the update file from Apple's CDN directly and manually updated your iPod Touch via iTunes, not that I ever did that as that would be very naughty ;-))
Wow. I have no words. This is quite something, even for Apple.
> to comply with the DMA’s requirements, we had to remove the Home Screen web apps feature in the EU. [...] Still, we regret any impact this change [...] may have.
Regrets all the way to the bank. I'm sure it has nothing to do with the Core Technology Fee whatsoever.
To be fair, not even Firefox (desktop) can be bothered to support PWA.
PWA is, as an honest assessment, dead. It was a neat idea - kind of like BeOS or Amiga - but it's dead.
My personal take is this is because PWA had too little to define itself to the everyday Joe with. The appeal of PWA was primarily to developers - because then they wouldn't need to build apps or pay fees. What appeals to developers though, doesn't have any intrinsic appeal to Joe.
That may be so, but why did Apple start providing Safari/macOS support for PWAs less than half a year ago with the latest macOS launch then? They clearly care about it a little bit.
I wouldn’t say that they cared. I say that they begrudgingly were being dragged towards supporting PWA functionality, and now they have a strong case to stop being dragged in that direction.
>Addressing the complex security and privacy concerns associated with web apps using alternative browser engines would require building an entirely new integration architecture that does not currently exist in iOS and was not practical to undertake given the other demands of the DMA and the very low user adoption of Home Screen web apps.
If alternative browser engines and PWA is enough to pwn iOS, maybe it was never really secure in the first place.
If you're talking about Spectre-like attacks from within PWAs, the same risk exists for every page you visit using Safari today (and "Firefox EU edition" on iOS tomorrow).
> JIT is a large attack surface because of how JIT works.
From the point of view of the OS, a 3rd party application using JIT can't do anything more than a 3rd party application not using JIT, which Apple have to allow anyway.
And still it's laughable that the only "mitigation" Apple found was to remove a feature that most people didn't even know about (because Apple made it difficult to even access in the first place!). That surely will have an impact on the security of the 2 people that knew about that feature.
By the way, why isn't MacOS so insecure if it allows all sorts of 3rd party apps, with or without JIT, and even allow apps creating shortcuts on the desktop themselves?
> When there is only browser - Apple can easily push an emergency patch. With 3rd party browsers this isn't possible.
Lot of people don't immediately apply OS updates, and Safari is part of the OS so it cannot be updated in other ways. 3rd party browsers instead can be very quickly updated like any normal apps without even requiring a reboot of the OS. It seems to me that a competent 3rd party app has a better security model than Safari.
They explicitly allow JIT for DMA third-party browser engines (even for embedded engines, I believe, which is technically quite tricky to do compared to for full browser apps!), so that can't be the problem here.
Why use this extremely indirect signal to evaluate security when the direct signals like exploit markets indicate iOS is among the most secure consumer computing environments ever?
>Addressing the complex security and privacy concerns associated with web apps using alternative browser engines would require building an entirely new integration architecture that does not currently exist in iOS and was not practical to undertake given the other demands of the DMA and the very low user adoption of Home Screen web apps.
This makes me worried Apple will remove PWA support altogether.
This basically kills progressive web apps. The premise of PWA is that it can run on any device. If PWAs can't run on EU iPhones, quite a big market, then it makes zero sense for developers to invest in building PWAs. So unfortunate.
To be honest, outside of Hacker News and other "nerd" circles, I have never heard anyone talk about PWAs. Outside our circles, I would not be shocked if literally nobody cares about them. Basically dead on arrival.
The only place I've really seen them talked about is the Microsoft Store, where they can be sold as apps. They also all have 2 stars or less with people screeching "PWA - not an app!"
I also don't buy that it's even a big tech conspiracy. Firefox (desktop) couldn't, and still can't, be bothered to care about PWA support.
It's a dead tech. A neat idea, but dead. I think this is because, for most people - why would they care? Maybe if they have a cheap device that has low storage space. The people who cared most about PWA are developers who don't want to build apps or pay fees - but users don't give a darn about that.
Of course. But PWA's biggest roadblock is poor platform support. So Apple actively going against PWAs is a major blow. And personally I'm a big fan of open standards and hate that I have to install an app through walled gardens for everything.
I agree on a technical level. I also recognize this is, unfortunately, something that only technically-inclined people care about. Your mom probably doesn't even understand why installing outside the App Store would ever be desirable. (This is not intended to be an insult - I'm trying to point out that I have never found any group in the "real world" that cares.)
I agree with you largely, but it's not just about PWAs. It's about open standards vs closed ecosystems. Open standards limit the power of big tech companies like Apple and other gatekeepers. I can see how closed ecosystems benefit the user, but it also worries me how powerful big tech has become, and their power only seems to be growing. iMessage vs RCS is a similar case. Gatekeeper power abuse is not a theoretical problem, see Epic/Spotify vs Apple.
>it makes zero sense for developers to invest in building PWAs
I can't see this as anything but a solid win for end users.
I am fucking tired of non-native, JavaShit-laden "web apps" that each demand a dozen web browser processes and run like drunken dogs on a Friday night.
This does nothing to address that issue. Developers will still make their cross-platform apps with web tech, but now they also have to ship a native wrapper to get onto the homescreen.
I first had to add the add to homescreen button to the share menu with the "Edit Actions" option.
If I search add to homescreen button missing I find nothing... or worse actually. They say to restart safari, restart the phone and then reinstall iOS.
I've considered making a page on my website explaining how to do this but it smells to much like something the user is not suppose to do. It's asking a lot? Very suspicious? Am I getting hacked?
It's as if developing an operating system with the assumption that it will only ever support one browsing engine forever was misguided in the first place.
On the contrary, I don't think accountants would tell Apple to pick a fight with the EU; idealists would. They may not share your ideals, or mine, but doing "letter of the law" and "bare minimum malicious compliance" is absolutely something someone does because their principles would be offended by doing otherwise.
>I don't think accountants would tell Apple to pick a fight with the EU;
They don't have any fight with the EU yet.
Apple's accountants and lawyer are only engaging in malicious compliance with the EU so that they cause the most annoyance in the EU while still being legally in the green to not have a fight.
It's precisely what accountants and lawyers would do.
They absolutely do. The EU took a step, then Apple took a step, and I fully expect the EU to take further steps in response, both in terms of further regulation and in malicious enforcement. (When engaging in malicious compliance, you'd better be sure you're following the letter of the law to the last detail, including anything a court may be willing to nitpick and might otherwise dismiss or discount for someone not engaged in malicious compliance.)
Frankly, the biggest reason I'm annoyed with Apple for doing this is that it's likely to contribute to the existence of a future worse version of the DMA that overreaches in the course of precision.
Apple didn't need to take any extra steps. They just had to comply, while keeping functionality as is, they didn't need to break it in the process.
Apple's response is the corporate equivalent of that toddler who smashes things out of spite when things don't go his way.
>and I fully expect the EU to take further steps in response, both in terms of further regulation and in malicious enforcement
Bureaucratic politics respond way way slower than wealthy tech companies with 7 figure lawyers on payroll. It's a legal game of whack-a-mole and the likes of Apple are high-score players at this.
> Apple didn't need to take any extra steps. They just had to comply, that's it.
And they did comply.
If you regulate something by saying "X and Y must have equal capabilities", a company can comply by reducing the capabilities of X rather than increasing the capabilities of Y. And in the general case that's valid; the alternative would be punishing a company for having more capabilities in X in the first place, where a company that didn't have those capabilities to begin with wouldn't be punished for not adding them.
(To be clear, I don't like in the first place that Apple didn't allow third-party apps or browsers, and I wish they'd opened that up to begin with, and that we'd never had or needed the DMA.)
> Yeah, right. Bureaucratic politics respond way way slower than well funded tech companies with 7 figure lawyers on payroll.
Sure. They've picked a very slow fight with the EU. But when the EU punches back, it may well do so with massive additional legislation with its own unintended consequences, and fines measured in percentages of global revenue.
Can someone please clarify? Deep down I hope that "home screen apps" means something else than the recently added support for PWAs...
Does this mean PWAs will not work anymore on iOS?
It's just a f*cking link on the home screen. Opening in the browser of the user's choice.
This doesn't only hurt PWA's, it also hurts very simple webapps that are nothing more than a responsive website with some functionality and data. Made easily accessible by a link (with title and favicon) on the homescreen.
Of course, one can open a browser, wait, click again on some bookmark icon, scroll to the webapp, click it, wait again... and use it just like that.
The world wide web is an evil place. Luckily Apple protects everybody with an iPhone. The year of the Linux desktop, Linux tablet, Linux phone, Linux smartwatch, Linux AR glasses could not come soon enough.
>Luckily Apple protects everybody with an iPhone. The year of the Linux desktop, Linux tablet, Linux phone, Linux smartwatch, Linux AR glasses could not come soon enough.
No chance, look at HN, the top comments are defending Apple's stance. If even tech savvy geeks lap up Apple's propaganda, what hope is there for the average user?
Exactly. Try to forget the average user for a while. The niche is smaller but still exists.
I think it's possible. Think of a combination of Jobs's vision of a hub-and-spoke model of computing devices, powered by SBC's and Waveshare components and open source software. For a start.
It won't be premium devices as people are now expecting of Apple devices, but there comes a point where people are willing to trade in nicer hardware for nicer software and functionality.
I don't know who the early adopters are going to be of this, but I know a lot of comment sections on HN with people also fed up about the direction of big tech.
There is a bug in Safari's Intelligent Tracking Protection where sometimes when I visit one of my own websites, it will refuse to send an auth cookie. ITP forces this behavior if you have used Safari for seven consecutive days without visiting a website... but it seems to occasionally happen by mistake, which is very frustrating UX. This problem doesn't exist with home-screen web apps, which are now unavailable in the EU.
The only real reason to use PWA so far was access to Web Push Notifications on iOS, which likely to stop working altogether. If you fork $99 to apple, you may be able to use "Safari Push Notifications". Maybe one of their 600 new apis will allow Chrome to show notifications?
People need to own the unintended side effects of their preferred regulation instead of constantly complaining about companies not embracing the “spirit” of said regulation.
Hmm -- are you suggesting that Apple is lying in their rationales here? That they should have instead kept supporting PWAs but only on WebKit, in violation of the DMA? Or that they should have argued the DMA doesn't require PWA support for alternative browser engines?
Or that it's in fact straightforward to offer an API for browser engines to integrate with caching, background operations, notifications, etc., and Apple should have held off compliance with DMA until these were implemented?
If so I'd love to learn more. I'm sort of inclined to believe that these currently sit deep in WebKit and it's a nontrivial exercise to pull them out and offer them as an API to other browser engines.
> that they should have argued the DMA doesn't require PWA support for alternative browser engines?
That would have been the least controversial aspect of their first attempt at compliance, in my view.
They could have also just allowed third-party browsers to offer a "PWA home screen" as an intermediate step until the APIs are ready. I can't think of a PWA API that's impossible to implement in a third-party browser other than appearing on the home screen and in the app switcher under its own icon.
They could have also just forced the same upon WebKit PWAs until the API is ready.
So many options. Yes, all of them would have taken some engineering work, but that hasn't stopped them from doing very complicated things in other aspects of their DMA compliance framework.
a user can stay in safari if it trusts apple with web security
a user can download spying native apps from the apple app store but I cannot decide to trust Google, Microsoft, Mozilla with their browser security sandbox?
mac os users have been safe from service workers and web app capabilities using chrome and firefox and edge in the last 5-10 years
surely apple is able to keep ios and ipados users safe from these scary other browser engines
it is much easier to safeguard 3-10 other browser engines than millions of native apps
in addition, do they really have to pay attention to other than chrome, edge and firefox? if somebody uses a chinese spy browser or a russian, the same when somebody downloads any other spying ot malicious native app
do they even need to care about me optin out from safari on MY 1000 dollar iphone?
what the fuck, I am not a child!
keep safari safe and at max give me some warning before downloading chrome or firefox or whatever!
It sounds like it would, though, require an engineering effort on par with building a new feature from scratch in order to support PWAs in the DMA environment. It makes sense that a firm might be willing to invest in minimal maintenance of a feature, but wouldn’t build it again if faced with the choice today. And the DMA forced the choice again today.
Since ~nobody uses PWAs, or at least so few people that Apple can’t justify the effort to retain any advantages PWAs confer on its own browser/OS, doesn’t it become a business decision at that point?
it is also an effort to build access for disabled people
the difference is Apple has practically disabled the web as an app store and in the future if it is possible to launch web apps on every platform, there will be 99% web apps
apple is a big company and it is such a vital thing they can and will be forced what android, windows, linux, mac os(!) can do...
it is like claiming not many disabled people wanted to use my services until now (huge stairs without lift or so) so I just do not want this 2 days and 0,000000001% of my monopolisitc budget to build access for them
Can confirm. I have an android device that was given to me by my company and PWAs work just fine in Firefox. It's not a matter of technical limitations, it's just the poor multitrillion dollar company is gonna screw over their customers while scary government bureaucrats won't let them have their cake and eat it as well.
They don't say it's a technical limitation, they say it was too much work to do for a relatively underused feature?
> Addressing the complex security and privacy concerns associated with web apps using alternative browser engines would require building an entirely new integration architecture that does not currently exist in iOS and was not practical to undertake given the other demands of the DMA and the very low user adoption of Home Screen web apps.
Indeed, and the icon has a Firefox badge on it so I know it is Firefox running the show. If things go south I know who to blame: Firefox. The same goes for Cromite (which used to be Bromite, which is a de-fanged de-Googled version of Chromium) or any other browser which offers this functionality.
See, Apple? This is how you can implement PWAs so that users do not accuse you of other browser's problems. Then again I assume this is already known in Cupertino but not implemented because it would break down that wall around the garden, brick by brick.
This is quite easier said than done. Simply copying a feature from competitor is not neccessarily easy especially if they challenge deep architectural decisions that have been made in the past.
So PWA also must be removed from Android for DMA compliance I guess? Let's see if Google remove them because "DMA" or if Google ends up being sanctioned for this.
When you try to control something with regulation, don't ever expect good faith. Expect exactly what you legislate, no more. (And expect unintended consequences, as well.) If you want legislation to make something happen, the legislation needs to specify precisely what you want.
If a company was interested in the "spirit" of the legislation, which is to say unwritten and underspecified rules above and beyond the legislation, they'd already be doing it without it having to be legislated.
Definitely, but what Apple doesn’t understand is that the EU usually does not settle for the unintended second-order effects of their v1. There will 100% be a DMA 2.0, and it will punish this kind of behavior even more.
The same thing has happened to Apple themselves over NFC access. They should be familiar with the pattern!
Absolutely. And the net result will itself have unintended consequences and ripple effects through the industry; the net result of this fight will not be good for people who care about technology, potentially even for those who agree with the current DMA, because the more legislation has to specify the more likely it is to overreach or have impedance mismatches. When I said "When you try to control something with regulation, don't ever expect good faith.", I was being descriptive, not normative.
I don't know, many EU regulations have had a very immediate positive effect on my life, like prohibiting some types of roaming fees, forcing airlines to compensate passengers for delays and cancellations, capping credit card interchange etc., and all of these were highly complex as well.
Others have famously backfired – I hate cookie notices as much as everybody else.
Precisely, and Apple have implemented the law in good-faith by reducing service in their own product offering to make things equal, as the law requires them to do so. Ergo, be careful what you wish for, because it might come true.
Is it so hard to believe that I have read every quoted word of Apple's technical reasoning in the article but still don't believe they've made a good-faith effort at coming up with a better solution?
Kinda, but if I remember correctly the website can be designed to open by it self rather than in safari with its own navigation menu. It can do a bunch of other things too.
It just shows they don't care, they are releasing a whole new platform right now and at the same time show one of the most abusing attitude to developer I think we have rarely seen.
Apple app store condition were already overreaching but this time they really went the extra length with every single of their DMA adaptations.