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Comment by robin_reala | Hacker News Reader

These black and white takes are boring. It can be all of the above.

Only one of the options affects the bottom line of Apple. Incentives incentives incentives. When you want to understand what and why people do what they do, always find out the incentives.

Then why would they have bothered adding any support in the first place? There are market incentives in at least appearing to be modern.

Web apps were the first apps that Apple supported on the iPhone, as of 2007. Back then they did not have native apps, that's why they bothered supporting them.

They then realized that they could make much more money with locked-down proprietary apps that they could tax at will through their App Store. Since then Apple has blocked any meaningful evolution of web apps, to prevent them from competing with native apps.

I don’t see how that fits the timeline.

The App Store was opened in 2008, and was a huge success in 2018 (https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/01/app-store-kicks-off-2...: “New Year’s Day Sets Record With $300 Million in Purchases”)

If “Since then Apple has blocked any meaningful evolution of web apps”, why did they add support for PWAs on iOS in 2018? (https://medium.com/awebdeveloper/progressive-web-apps-pwas-a...: “Safari is finally adding PWA features.”)

It's more complicated than that.

1) From a regulation standpoint, it's in Apple's interest for PWA's to exist; Apple has used the argument in court that PWA's are a viable alternative to it's App Store and therefore it does not have a monopoly on iOS "apps".

2) From a financial standpoint, it's in Apple's interest for the PWA experience to be sub-par.

And this is how we got here.

PWA’s are not at all the same thing as the “pin to Home Screen” feature in iOS 1.0.

PWA’s were a brand new subsystem introduced in iOS 11 with substantial (yet not emough) ongoing investment since then.

The conspiracy theory still doesn’t answer “why have then been investing in PWA’s since iOS 11?”, if they wanted them dead they could have just removed them rather than doing incremental enhancements.

Misalignment of the company bottom line (incentives) and employees bottom line (incentives). Company gets money from variable App Store revenue which is directly threatened by PWAs. Employees get money from fixed monthly salary, which is only indirectly threatened by PWAs.

Employees take money and do what is required of them, and otherwise do what they think is awesome. Employees think PWAs are awesome so PWAs happen... until they threaten almighty App Store then it stops.

> Company gets money from variable App Store revenue which is directly threatened by PWAs.

I don't see how a PWA-enabled Safari fits into this narrative.

Timeline:

0) Apple hires key people and invests 4 years in PWA support for Safari on iOS.

1) Apple releases support for PWAs in Safari for iOS worldwide.

2) The DMA compliance thing happens.

3) Apple allows alternative browser engines + disables PWAs in the EU.

4) Apple rolls back PWA disablement in the EU.

I mean, 0 and 1 are not some skunkwork. It hasn't been sneaked into the release. PWA support predates this DMA drama. It was disabled only in the EU.

PWAs challenging App Store revenue is completely orthogonal to them being Safari-exclusive or not. PWA support for iOS has been invested on, released, enabled, and has even more features coming up and prereleased in the tech preview. Nobody forced Apple to do that. That alone is solid material fact, blowing away hypothetical claims of evil intent.

>Nobody forced Apple to do that. That alone is solid material fact, blowing away hypothetical claims of evil intent.

Apple has been actively using the existence of PWA's as an argument in court that it's App Store does not have a monopoly on iOS app distribution. So, yes... It's likely Apple want's PWA's to exist on iOS.

It's also very likely (given their financial incentives) that they don't want them to be a very good experience.

Are they not incentivized to maintain battery life? Perception of battery life impacts sales. You can't sell App Store apps without phone sales. Yadda yadda yadda. You can argue this towards any preconceived notion you want here. Nobody has any actual evidence, despite all the absolutism in their posturing.

What is boring is pretending that technical considerations about battery life play anywhere near as decisive a role in this matter as simply protecting a multi-billion dollar line item that is app store revenue.

Black and white? Apple not allowing other browsers to have their own browser engines is a black-and-white decision. All or nothing. Apple or nothing. It's all about what Apple wants, and that's MONEY. They don't care about anything else by keeping other browser engines off their platform. It doesn't matter what stupid reason they spout off. It's always about money. Allowing functional PWAs and other browser engines on their walled-garden platform will mean they make less money from their app store. That's it, that's literally all this is about.

You mean euros instead of money, right? Because the changes were only for the EU region, so it’s euros and not dollars or kroner or what have you?

No, I mean MONEY in any form. Apple doesn't really care about users or developers, all they care about is money. They have proven again and again that they will hobble the product if it means they can make more money.

Not all EU countries use the euro.

My take is that it's more about control of the experience, which is something baked into Apple's DNA.

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