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Comment by bawolff | Hacker News Reader

> It doesn't hurt that setbacks for web app development coincidentally send developers into the open arms of Google and Apple's stores that collect a 30% cut of all revenue, so there was a good incentive to do it even if it didn't protect anyone.

That seems like a bit of a reach. Its an obscure feature that is rarely useful, and when it is all you have to do is send the right http header (if using chrome) and you get it back.

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Multithreading may be an obscure feature to you but runtime developers get requests for it all the time. SAB becoming widely available was definitely delayed.

I would still maintain that needing multithreading on a website is relatively rare, and specifically needing SharedArrayBuffer instead of just multiple proceses (e.g. webworkers) is even more rare.

Did use cases exist? Sure. But not sufficiently to move the needle on app store usage.

One of the most significant use cases that gets impacted is game dev.

Web games benefit significantly from SAB (see the Godot engine for example) and mobile games make up a pretty sizable chunk of app store usage, particularly in app purchases.

> Did use cases exist? Sure. But not sufficiently to move the needle on app store usage.

We can't say that for sure. There is no shortage of examples where Apple neglects a feature that might provide parity with their own services to avoid competition. Safari, being a mandatory feature of iOS, is reasonably implicated as part of the conspiracy to prevent users from buying and selling software without the assent of a corporate benefactor.

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