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Comment by mdhb | Hacker News Reader

I understand their motivations for wanting to keep the cash cow going as long as possible but they are so openly hostile to consumer choice and developers at this point in a way that’s going to be hard to undo.

The web has changed so much in the past ten years and with things like WASM and WebGPU beginning to land in browsers the list of use cases for native iOS apps is quickly disappearing.

I hope the EU shuts down this malicious compliance quickly so they have to actually innovate on something other than how to best take hostages.

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WebGPU and WASM are last on my list of things that are missing from PWAs on iOS. Native integration into the rest of the OS both on a UX and functionality level is much more important to me personally.

This includes things like background data pre-fetching (e.g. for a read-it-later-like app, I want all my articles to sync so that I can read them on the subway without network coverage), offline/local notifications (e.g. for a to-do list), proper backup support (all my PWAs get their local state wiped whenever I switch iPhones!), access to the local file APIs (both as a provider for things like Dropbox and as a consumer for things like document editors) and much more.

There are many apps that already don't need any of these, though. Most airline, ticketing, hotel, shopping etc. apps should really just be PWAs at this point.

You’re correct in that there is a long list of things missing from their specific implementation. It’s another arm of the same overall strategy to starve users of real choice and try to achieve maximum vendor lock-in.

I was just making an observation about the web as a platform in general in that has changed on that front.

Netflix not supporting the Apple VR headset is a great example of the consequences of screwing over the developers. Prioritizing short term gains.

Apple however makes their own content w/ Apple TV so if the headset takes off Netflix will be forced to adopt whatever standard Apple is making. Let's be real - watching 2D video on a VR headset feels dumb whether you're doing it from a browser or a native app. The device supports a browser approach.

First Safari has to properly support them.

Just yesterday you were telling me in a comment that this was a selling point that they didn’t want to support these things.

Guess what company is pushing all the the ChromeOS features into the Web.

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