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Comment by MeinBlutIstBlau | Hacker News Reader

I understand why Apple is doing it, but what does it hurt if I develop for Safari on Windows? Oh no you have to compile the app and support on Windows? Gimme a break. $1 Trillion company and they can't make that work is nothing short of a joke. The OS wars are nothing like they were in the 90s. Apple really needs to wake the hell up. Steve Balmer said it best:

"DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!"

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And Steve Ballmer really backed that up by making it possible to compile and test Windows and Microsoft products on every Linux distribution

Well it hurts because your company might not buy you a Mac.

honestly why develop for safari anyway? you can't really complain about apple if you keep bending over backwards to support their software

iOS has around 75% of the mobile apps revenues apparently.

In the US, I assume? Also, note that app stores aren't the only revenue, and precisely because the web does not work as well on ios devices, this number will be slightly biased in apples case.

It appears to be globally, though it depends on what you count exactly (65% of the total revenues, I was off sorry, but 80% of all subscription revenues). The reality is that the hundreds of millions in poorer countries with Android spend peanuts compared to rich countries. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/app-revenues/

But whatever the exact number, the point stands. In most cases, not supporting iOS is a silly business decision.

iOS number includes China Market, while Android's dont. So that distort the numbers a bit. But yes, the main point still stands.

If up to 75% of paying customers browsing on mobile use safari would you serve them a broken website? Remember that 100% of browsers in iOS is safari. Everything else is just Safari with a skin. If I could I would block apple users out with a warning about their broken browser but I doubt any business survive for long if they had a habit of leaving money on the table.

Every single iOS user I know uses Chrome as their browser specifically because Safari is a broken mess in which nothing ever works.

Iphone users aren't allowed to install Chrome. They want chrome, but all they get is a shitty chrome skin on Safari. It does trick a lot of people into thinking that they actually have chrome though.

>I understand why Apple is doing it

Do you? It sounds like you're implying that they can't do it, despite also pointing out that they easily could.

They did the technical work to allow WebKit to build on Windows: https://webkit.org/webkit-on-windows/

That's the AppleWin port which relies on non-redistributable libraries, using the iTunes compatibility libraries.

There's also upstream the WinCairo port, which is redistributable. (can be downloaded from Buildbot at https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/BuildingCairoOnWindows#Download...)

It's just that Apple doesn't want to make Safari as a whole available on Windows, while making it easy for others to develop browsers using that same engine - even on Windows.

They used to distribute Safari on Windows. Back then it had little adoption.

Little adoption among users, but still super useful to developers. I wish they still did.

(WebKit isn't enough; I often need to test Safari behavior specifically)

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