You're not allowed to provide your own web render engine at all. The JIT issue was solved a couple versions of iOS ago - embedded webviews now get JIT just like Safari.
So WKWebView's dynamically generated code is running safely firewalled in a separate address space controlled by Apple and not accessible to your app, while older UIWebViews run in the address space of your application, and aren't allowed to write to code pages, so their JIT compiler is disabled.
Since it's running in another process, WkWebView's JavaScriptEngine lacks the ability to expose your own Objective C classes to JavaScript so they can be called directly [2], but it does include a less efficient way of adding script message handlers that call back to Objective C code via IPC [3].
[1] https://developer.apple.com/reference/iosurface
[2] https://developer.apple.com/reference/javascriptcore/jsexpor...
[3] https://developer.apple.com/reference/webkit/wkusercontentco...
Is that true? I understand the security argument against JITs, but I don't see why it would be objectionable to run a copy of e.g. Gecko if you excluded the JS JIT component. (Of course you would never actually do that. But I'm trying to tease apart the separate arguments and see if they're actually connected.)
It seems to me that the root cause for this is all the JIT. If the JIT in iOS has to be exposed via IPC for security (as claimed in a sibling comment) it's simply not going to be a win to try to use it in combination with a separate rendering engine, if it's even possible at all.
It is. Mozilla has an iOS port of Gecko. It runs well, even without the JIT, but we are not allowed to use it.
https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/tip/embedding/io...
Sorry I dont know where we keep the build instructions.
So you can maybe ship Gecko + SpiderMonkey, as long as you only run JS that's part of your app. But if you want to run JS from a website (or indeed any code from anywhere), you're not allowed to do that on iOS.
I haven't checked whether it would be OK to ship a browser engine that doesn't support JS at all, but that's a fairly academic question anyway.
That is not true. Many apps do this. Games have been doing this for a decade. It is not a problem to do this. Apple has never made a big deal of that. Only if you are trying to build a shadow app store.
Apple does not care. As long as you are operating in the spirit of their App Store.
You know when they care? When you start charging money for those downloads. Via an alternative payment channel. Or when you run an alternative app store from within your app.
If you download assets on demand, and some of those turn out to be executable* code, nobody cares.
* Where executable means 'interpreted' because you cannot run unsigned code. But for games that is fine, they have been doing this with JS, Lua and Python for a decade.
(You can downvote me - but this is based on a decade of experience)
The subject we're talking about here would not fly under their radar.
Pebble used this quite effectively to add phone-side apps to their product.
I guess what's bothering me is that there is an unstated assumption underlying this entire discussion which people never bring up: for performance reasons, the rendering engine has to be tied closely to the JS implementation. Specifically, calling over some IPC interface at every entrypoint into the JS interpreter would be a performance nightmare. This is the reason why these can't be disentangled. The connection to the interpreter is really an indirect one.
> 2.5.6 Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript.