Comment by feross | Hacker News Reader

Comment by feross | Hacker News Reader

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Apple recently suggested [1] to Australian authorities that Apple can't possibly have a monopoly on app distribution since they have no restrictions against PWAs which "have the look, feel and functionality of a native app". But they fail to mention that they control exactly what functionality is actually available to PWAs. And right now it's A LOT less than what is available to native apps.

Also, most users are not aware that third-party iOS browsers like Chrome, Brave, and Firefox are actually just light UI "skins" on top of the Safari browser engine, Webkit. Apple refuses to allow third party browser engines on iOS.

So this means that it's not possible for users to just switch to another browser in order to use more powerful web apps. They're literally prevented from doing so by Apple's policy to ban browser competition on iOS.

[1]: https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Apple%20Pty%20Limited%2...

> Also, most users are not aware that third-party iOS browsers like Chrome, Brave, and Firefox are actually just light UI "skins" on top of the Safari browser engine, Webkit. Apple refuses to allow third party browser engines on iOS.

IME even a lot of developers are unaware of this fact.

An added annoyance flowing from this is that Apple does not allow remote debugging for webviews, so any reasonable debugging flow for those browsers is blocked. Great fun when you have a bug in iOS Chrome only.

You can remote debug webviews (from Safari on a Mac), but only web views in apps signed with a development provisioning profile (1). So to debug web content in iOS Chrome you would have to build and install Chromium for iOS yourself, rather than use the Chrome App Store version.

(1) https://webkit.org/web-inspector/enabling-web-inspector/

This statement both misunderstands skins and browser rendering engines (and javascript/jit).

Apple does not prevent or refuse third party browser engines.

Can you elaborate?

My understanding is that third party engines are allowed. They just can’t JIT the JavaScript unless they use the builtin Safari one. So, if you want to have the same performance of the builtin Safari browser, you really need to be nothing more than a skin around it.

This is false too. "Nothing more than a skin" suggests you can't make a full-featured browser, with your own code, that you're just replacing the Safari UI. This is simply not true.

I literally said that they are allowed. They just can’t JIT the JavaScript, so performance suffers compared to Safari. So, if you don’t care about JS performance, then yes, you can make your own full browser with your own rendering code.

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