Comment by TheGlav | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheGlav | Hacker News Reader

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They built their PWA support with assumptions about how the application, OS, and WebKit were going to run. That's like saying, "Oh, Microsoft didn't build an API layer into Windows to support running X11 apps side by side with Win32 apps, so they were being monopolistic." No, you have limited engineering time and you make engineering tradeoffs. You don't need to design an interface layer and API and hooks between system components if your design doesn't call for it or doesn't need it.

> They built their PWA support in an anticompetitive manner assuming App Store & WebKit would be a monopoly forever, and now as a result the baby is going out with the bathwater.

They built it in such a way that it was sustainable and sensible for the time it was made (iOS 2.0). That's a really long time ago in the software world. More than a dozen versions of the OS have been built on top of this. Saying "they should have just figured it out back then" is completely ignoring the reality of what was offered by the OS and the mobile space entirely at the time.

Now laws have been passed that say "you must provide alternatives." OK. They can choose to spend an ungodly amount of time refactoring the OS to undo 16 revisions of the OS of assumptions for zero benefit for the company, or they can say "Sorry we can't comply with that for your market."

It sucks. But it's a result of reasonable business decisions and their evolutions from a significantly different era.

No, it's saying that they shouldn't have designed a operating system with no support for other browsers (unlike lesser known alternatives such as "Apple Mac OS X") in the first place and that you shouldn't have any sympathy when such an anticompetitive technical design and behavior blows up in their face.

> They built it in such a way that it was sustainable and sensible for the time it was made (iOS 2.0).

Support for installing progressive web apps was added in iOS 11 [1], released in 2017. This is decade(s) after Microsoft was dragged to court in the US and EU for similar behavior with Internet Explorer. Of course being the authoritarian company they are, Apple would rather dig their heels until the bitter end instead of just doing the right thing.

> Saying "they should have just figured it out back then" is completely ignoring the reality of what was offered by the OS and the mobile space entirely at the time.

Sorry, but the rest of the mobile space did figure it out at the same time. All of the things being debated in this thread simply just work on any Android phone and Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox in a secure manner. I'm so tired of this reality distortion field.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/releasenotes/Gen...

> did figure it out at the same time.

And it probably took the space a non trivial amount of time to figure it out whilst apple allocated their time on other features.

Now a regulation says that Apple should figure it out and Apple says they'd prefer to continue to allocate their time on other features.

Apple is not government company, they do not make decision on what makes all users happy, regardless of how small the feature they are building is. They make decision based on how much profit they're expected to make. Apple probably calculated the efforts and possible profits on this and profits would probably be negative on both options to either build pwa support on arbitrary browsers vs remove pwa support on all browsers altogether. Removing support was probably the option that showed lower profit loss across the short term.

In the end, I still think it's a bad move, but why should Apple care about what I think?

I don't use pwas, I don't even use apple products.

They are being rightfully forced to open all their gatekeeping features, in this case, they simply chose to remove the feature as a whole instead of opening it up to everyone. They will take a loss here, but it might be a smaller loss when compared with the effort that they'd have to do if they were to open the feature in the limited time the EU has given them.

Maybe in the future they'll do it, but not now.

I don't see why everyone is getting so worked up about this, apple is in it for the profit, even if it mean losing some in the short term. Why is this so surprising?

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