In Its Tantrum With Europe, Apple Broke Web Apps in iOS 17 Beta (theregister.com) 66
An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple has argued for years that developers who don't want to abide by its rules for native iOS apps can always write web apps. It has done so in its platform guidelines, in congressional testimony, and in court. Web developers, for their part, maintain that Safari and its underlying WebKit engine still lack the technical capabilities to allow web apps to compete with native apps on iOS hardware. To this day, it's argued, the fruit cart's laggardly implementation of Push Notifications remains subpar.
The enforcement of Europe's Digital Markets Act was expected to change that -- to promote competition held back by gatekeepers. But Apple, in a policy change critics have called "malicious compliance," appears to be putting web apps at an even greater disadvantage under the guise of compliance with European law. In the second beta release of iOS 17.4, which incorporates code to accommodate Europe's Digital Markets Act, Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) have been demoted from standalone apps that use the whole screen to shortcuts that open within the default browser. This appears to solely affect users in the European Union, though your mileage may vary. Concerns about this demotion of PWAs surfaced earlier this month, with the release of the initial iOS 17.4 beta. As noted by Open Web Advocacy -- a group that has lobbied to make the web platform more capable -- "sites installed to the home screen failed to launch in their own top-level activities, opening in Safari instead."
The enforcement of Europe's Digital Markets Act was expected to change that -- to promote competition held back by gatekeepers. But Apple, in a policy change critics have called "malicious compliance," appears to be putting web apps at an even greater disadvantage under the guise of compliance with European law. In the second beta release of iOS 17.4, which incorporates code to accommodate Europe's Digital Markets Act, Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) have been demoted from standalone apps that use the whole screen to shortcuts that open within the default browser. This appears to solely affect users in the European Union, though your mileage may vary. Concerns about this demotion of PWAs surfaced earlier this month, with the release of the initial iOS 17.4 beta. As noted by Open Web Advocacy -- a group that has lobbied to make the web platform more capable -- "sites installed to the home screen failed to launch in their own top-level activities, opening in Safari instead."
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Since you have to log in to post anonymously, do the Karma moderations still hit your account?
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Thank you, sir or madam. But you can't if you already commented.
Was this not expected?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would anyone think that Apple would not react to the EU's brazen attempts to take away revenue?
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Why - because they think all this stuff happens in a vacuum, and if they merely decree something, it will automagically happen as they expect.
Re: Was this not expected?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it seems odd, at least without some additional context.
To fight EU regulations that threaten their bottom line, ok, at least logically consistent.
To apparently antagonize then by downgrading the PWA experience only for Europe? On the surface that seems uselessly petty. It doesn't advance apple business objectives, and doesn't help then navigate the EU regulations, it just pisses off people for no reason.
Now maybe there's additional context, like it was a bug that was a side effect of work to modify facets of ios in Europe. But given the data given, it is absolutely a surprise.
Re: Was this not expected?! (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, it seems odd, at least without some additional context.
Not really knowledgeable about the internals, but it would not suprise me if PWA rely on special capabilities only available on Safari which Apple doesn't want to make available to third-party browsers.
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on special capabilities only available on Safari which Apple doesn't want to make available to third-party browsers.
That sounds like a reasonable guess and probably partly true.
But I also wonder if it's to make sure that PWAs keep working exactly the same, as none of the current PWAs would have been tested on any other browser.
Re: Was this not expected?! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's likely a result of the EU law. Think about it for a second - the DMA requires Apple to allow any web browser on the iPhone.
In the past, all the web browsers use the system WebKit libraries, so web apps would launch in their own special Safari instance. No problem there.
But now, because you're allowed to install any web browser, guess what? PWAs cannot launch in Safari because you may want to launch it in your own browser! You don't want Safari? OK, then PWAs should launch in your chosen browser as well, like say, Firefox.
After all, if PWAs launched in Safari still, Apple would be violating the law since for those "web sites" it's not using the user's preferred browser.
And since I'm sure Apple didn't make a special way to launch a PWA, they've been demoted to a simple bookmark - so the user's chosen browser will open and run the PWA instead.
Safari can no longer pretend to be an app mode running a PWA because that's treating Safari special - something Apple cannot do anymore.
Chances are, the law broke the feature because it required Apple to allow anyone to use their own web browsing engine. What integration the OS had with Safari no longer can exist, so PWAs became shortcuts and it's up to the user's browser to do something. The OS can no longer cache the PWA (that's a Safari job, and we can't use Safari), so it's been completely demoted to a simple bookmark.
Chances are, it'll get fixed - Apple will design an API that a browser must implement in order to handle PWAs, and make those web browser dev work just a bit harder. But in the mean time, well, the law said Apple had to free the browser, and Apple did. The fact the user experience worsened is a side effect.
Re: Was this not expected?! (Score:3)
Yet you can use any browser you want in Android, and it doesn't have this problem. Firefox implemented this a long time ago:
https://www.thurrott.com/mobil... [thurrott.com]
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Sure, though I suspect his point would be that Android had facilities to allow Firefox to do that, and Apple might have offered no facilities to do so, so step 1 might be to "downgrade" appicons to bookmarks.
Of course, this is all speculation, at least until Apple comes out and says why it happened and if they have a roadmap to do better.
Seems like they'd need a way to register a PWA 'bookmark' as a launcher, for the launcher to indicate to the browser the PWA status, for their activities management to have
Re: Was this not expected?! (Score:2)
Every time one something like this happens, people seem to imagine a billionaire cabal plotting petty revenge and unleashing some vast planned conspiracy.
Almost every time.. it's just Galactus.
https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ?s... [youtu.be]
A hundred unrelated decisions and compromises leave some hapless engineer with only bad options, and this is the best they could do and they hate it, and everyone will hate them and no one will ever wish them a happy birthday.
Because Omega star couldn't get their shit together
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I've seen so many efforts that end up with a backend that convoluted and thus far I've always seen them fail, but people keep going for it.
People advocating for microservices and having success I like to imagine being disappointed with how their guidance was taken. "Hey, the industry affinity of one process to serve all kinds of requests is hard to maintain, maybe you should break it up a bit" turns into "let's make an impossible maze of services with responsibilities randomly split up without thought to w
Cutting their nose off to spite their face. (Score:2)
Actually, it seems odd, at least without some additional context.
To fight EU regulations that threaten their bottom line, ok, at least logically consistent.
To apparently antagonize then by downgrading the PWA experience only for Europe? On the surface that seems uselessly petty. It doesn't advance apple business objectives, and doesn't help then navigate the EU regulations, it just pisses off people for no reason.
Now maybe there's additional context, like it was a bug that was a side effect of work to modify facets of ios in Europe. But given the data given, it is absolutely a surprise.
So... In order for Apple to give a middle finger to the EU for having the audacity to look after it's constituents, Apple has made themselves worse than the competition, I mean even worse.
Is forcing everyone to use the same crappy browser really so profitable that they'll risk marketshare in one of the worlds largest and most profitable markets?
It's like American websites trying to fight the GDPR with cookie popups, all it's doing is reminding people why the GDPR needs to exist.
Re:Was this not expected?! (Score:5, Interesting)
It makes perfect sense to me that this is just a natural consequence of Apple obeying the EU's rule.
I don't see a way Apple could, in the near term, do anything differently. In the longer term they could define some sort of standard "web app" flag that any browser could detect so it could hide its UI or take other appropriate steps. Or not, however it chooses.
Apple must allow a choice of browser but the store (Score:2)
Apple must allow a choice of browser but the store rules limit that choice and what ones can be in the main store.
or an more open but a dev fee loaded alt store.
Re:Was this not expected?! (Score:5, Insightful)
It makes perfect sense to me that this is just a natural consequence of Apple obeying the EU's rule.
Having a web app open in a different browser than the one it was created in would be catastrophic, whether the user changed the default browser or not. There's no guarantee that a specific web app will work at all in a different browser, much less be usable.
Worse, moving a web app from one browser engine to another would prevent you from having access to any content stored with the initial browser engine, so the current design effectively makes it harder for users to change the default browser by ensuring that it would break all of their web apps, which is likely to be a clear violation of the law in question.
There's only one way that Apple can implement this without running afoul of the law: Make the web app open in whatever app created it. Provide a public API that allows third-party browsers to register a web app on the home screen that opens in their browser with a specific URL scheme chosen by the app developer.
With that approach, when the user changes browsers, it won't break existing web apps. And if the user later decides to run a web app in a different browser for some bizarre reason, the user will still have the ability to delete the web app and re-create it with a different browser (or create a second one with the other browser).
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Access to other browsers' data is something we need to open up. On desktop systems, Firefox can import everything from Chrome. On iOS and Android, it can't.
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Access to other browsers' data is something we need to open up. On desktop systems, Firefox can import everything from Chrome. On iOS and Android, it can't.
Access to other browsers' data is also potentially a huge privacy/security concern, so if it gets opened up, it needs to be with explicit user permission, and that permission needs to go away upon the very next launch.
But I'm not talking about simple data like bookmark data and autofill data here. I'm talking about the contents of cookies, HTML5 local storage, IndexedDB, etc. To my knowledge, Firefox doesn't import that stuff from Chrome even on the desktop. Heck, Chrome and Safari don't even exchange da
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That's how it works, you get a UAC prompt when trying to import the data. Protected, but with the option for the user to grant permission to access it.
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Isn't the selling point of web apps is that they'll work with any browser engine? If they're tied to a specific browser engine, that defeats the whole purpose. You lose that cross-platform portability, and we're back to the bad old days of "the web" b
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Web apps require a browser.
Apple must allow a choice of browser.
That's a very narrow interpretation of the rules. No one has ever equated web apps with the browser as their whole point was to not show the browser interface and not be part of the browser history in any way. The end user is never aware a browser is involved.
This is malicious compliance for a reason. The EU isn't going after webapps and Apple knows this.
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You've (conveniently) omitted their third point:
> There is no standard mechanism to tell a browser to render a page without displaying its UI (aka kiosk mode).
So OK, according to you the user is never aware that a browser is involved. Doesn't matter. Technically, a browser must be involved. Until recently, that was Safari. But now it can be something else.
Only, there's no standard way to tell random-browser-1234 to open full-screen without any GUI.
So, Apple has a choice:
1. Open all web apps full-screen i
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They chose #2, which meet the EU's requirements albeit in an ugly way. If they chose option #1, then they'd be denying users their choice of browser again. So the question is, will they implement a method in a future iOS release to let *any* browser know that it needs to open full-screen with no UI, so that it can handle web-apps?
Or, maybe other browser makers in the EU can add code to their browsers to allow certain web apps or even websites to automatically open without the GUI. Web app developers would then be able to optimize their apps for those other browsers, which would allow web app makers to further push adoption of alternative browsers in addition to just users who use them for browsing alone.
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Not yet, but you can be sure that when other browser vendors complain about it, the EU will listen.
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I don't see a way Apple could, in the near term, do anything differently. In the longer term they could define some sort of standard "web app" flag that any browser could detect so it could hide its UI or take other appropriate steps. Or not, however it chooses.
It's not like there is any other OS, or even a mobile OS, let's call it Android as an example, that has allowed to install PWAs from multiple browsers for years. If that was the case it would be embarrassing for Apple not finding a way to do it.
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"There is no standard mechanism to tell a browser to render a page without displaying its UI (aka kiosk mode)."
If only Apple could create a new standard for their OS.
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It makes perfect sense to me that this is just a natural consequence of Apple obeying the EU's rule.
I don't see a way Apple could, in the near term, do anything differently. In the longer term they could define some sort of standard "web app" flag that any browser could detect so it could hide its UI or take other appropriate steps. Or not, however it chooses.
Erm... No.
There is no requirement that Apple can't include a browser or even use that as the primary rendering engine in the OS or for API calls (or whatever Apple uses)... All this requirement states is that other rendering engines must be allowed, not that they have to completely supplant any inbuilt engine.
The only thing Apple has to do is allow Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Microsoft Chrome, et al. onto their app store without forcing them to use Apple's rendering engine.
Trying to punish Europeans by
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Maybe the fines that can take significantly more revenue? Or the possibility that they could get prohibited from offering their App-store at all in the EU? Apple cannot win this one.
Re: Was this not expected?! (Score:2)
Time to stop going soft on Apple (Score:2, Insightful)
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They aren't going to ban anything, the entire point of this legislation is to get more money out of Apple (and other tech firms). If they ban them, no more sweet sweet Apple $.
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Actually, it is not. In the EU, customer protection is quite real. I get that you do not expect that though.
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Nah. Just tell Apple that if this ships in a final release to consumers, they will be fined a million dollars for the first day, two million the second day, four million the third day, etc. until the problem is fixed. In 11 days, the fine crosses the billion dollars per day mark. In 16 days, Apple files for bankruptcy.
Re:Time to stop going soft on Apple (Score:4, Interesting)
In 16 days, Apple files for bankruptcy.
Or just writes the EU off as a lost cause.
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In that case, raise the fine to eleventy-billion, that''ll show 'em!
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They would be required to support EU customers as the law requires them to. Withdrawal would take many years. They have EU subsidiaries that would need to be wound down.
It's not like the US where they can just abandon their customers.
Still, it might be nice to be rid of Apple. They distort the market with their overpriced, limited crap. Non removable batteries, for example. Another thing that the EU is undoing.
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Still, it might be nice to be rid of Apple. They distort the market with their overpriced, limited crap. Non removable batteries, for example. Another thing that the EU is undoing.
It would also mean less crap from the competition, as they would be more regarded as monopolies. But I doubt it will happen. Somebody high up at Apple is just full of themselves and mistakenly believes the law does not apply to Apple. They will be shown the errors of their ways and somebody will get fired. Apple does really not want to lose the EU market.
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What is wrong with Apple these days?! (Score:5, Insightful)
All I can say as a long-time Apple user: they are being stupid. Their products are no longer fantastic or "thought leaders" or user-first. If I lost the ability to get rid of the safari navigation crap for things like Grafana dashboard shortcuts I would immediately switch platforms. Too much usability compromise.
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Apple. Apple is always the problem. They will always be a problem, until they cease existing.
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Obviously, they are being stupid. The EU has leveraged some impressive fines against big names in the past. It will do so against Apple as well if they do not start complying with the law. It is even possible that Apple wants to get rid of the person behind this stupidity and just lets that person hang themselves now.
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It's not just Apple. It's like everyone now. Look at Microsoft, Google, etc. :(
Does anyone actually use web apps? (Score:2)
As much as I like running software from who knows where, I don't knowingly use web apps. Are there any web apps out there that are of any use?
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Odds are good that you use or have used several without even noticing. PWAs aside, it's not unusual to see web apps packaged as native apps with something like Apache Cordova.
Apple has been wanting to further cripple PWAs for a while as they're a way into, and out of, their guilded cage. The web is a serious threat to them and they know it.
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Apple's original SDK used webapps before they exposed an Objective C toolkit.
c.f. webOS, Firefox OS, Chrome OS.
The reason practically no one uses web apps is because the duopoly insisted you need to visit the app store/google play.
The webkit/Chromium fork didn't help - Google added a bunch of stuff for Chrome OS which Apple aren't obliged to implement.
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To be fair, Google has been surprisingly supportive of PWAs. Apple was as well, before they realized how lucrative pushing apps could be.
This whole app crazy has been bad for everyone but Apple and Google. It's long past time we started pushing for open standards and interoperability.
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I would actually prefer if Google would dump the fastboot/adb/surfaceflinger franken-architecture of Android.
But they are reluctant to release Chrome OS/phone - Chrome OS is more of a traditional Linux than Android, utilizing among other things, Wayland and providing both a debian and an Android environment in a hypervisor.
But they'd never do that because their phone forces you to buy one of those stupid Chromecast dongles to access external screens whereas Chrome OS will support as many screens in extended
if only thats all that was broken (Score:1)
the end of PWAs? (Score:2)
Bugs (Score:1)