I saw this yesterday on twitter and my thought was "they don't support webrtc yet?!? seriously?"
It sometimes baffles me how apple is holding up progress on the web - and that they aren't criticized more for it.
It sometimes baffles me how apple is holding up progress on the web - and that they aren't criticized more for it.
Apple tends to take a little longer and suffer a little short-term pain to get it right in the long run.
[1] https://daringfireball.net/2017/05/safari_vs_chrome_on_the_m...
If all Apple cared about was the App Store then why do they continue to hire WebKit engineers and build new features ? It would be easier just to fork WebKit, never add anything new and deliberately make it so unusable that everyone rushes to apps.
I worked with a group of engineers full time for years around mobile/iOS, and we were pretty amazed at how severe but unaddressed these bugs were. The move to WKWebView was helpful, but still lacking. The app store parallel that you take issue with is an easy one to make when you contrast those failings against the talent and financial bandwidth of a company that size.
No there's not. I'm a web developer so I'm pretty invested in the web platform, but even I can see how incredibly naive this assertion is. Native will always win due to just having more power and capabilities. Web will always be a step behind.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by apathy or lack of resources.
Because Apple has always shaped so much of our development environment, it's easy to take these things as natural law. I'm assuming you're a younger developer based on your assertions – I would probably even agree with those suppositions based on the tone of posts like mine that seem anti-Apple. But the history of these technologies is glaring, and native/web/hybrid apps have never been given equal footing.
Nothing you said refutes a financial incentive in the app store, and most apps don't need "more power and capabilities", they need access to a basic API that isn't randomly crippled.
If you care about this subject, read about the history of UIWebView, WKWebView and hybrid apps, you will see how uniquely broken the platform is. Android doesn't suffer the same problems for a host of reasons, but that makes sense given Google's incentive for web. Hybrid and web apps are then not terribly appealing since they're only effective on one platform, so the ecosystem stagnates.
Here's a post I saw a few days ago, by coincidence: https://hackernoon.com/if-it-werent-for-apple-hybrid-app-dev...
Sure, but it stops your site from working cross-browser.
Apple famously refused to allow Flash on iOS and in doing so single-handedly did more to push HTML5 standards than anyone else. I'll also point out that WebRTC has gone through numerous iterations to such a degree that a lot of WebRTC sites don't work with Safari 11 because they're using old non-standards-compliant variants of the API.
The typical HN web dev seems to load their site in Chrome, click around a bit, and call it a day. That's not healthy for standards or the web, but it sure is lazy and expedient for a very narrow group of people.
Chrome is not the web.
I don't believe it's a short-sighted view. I think it's quite the opposite; my opinion comes from from spending years doing (web) development for it.
Their focus has always been on things that matter little (they were by far the first to implement `backdrop-filter`) while still keeping important things severely broken (as `position: fixed`) and messing with things that should work in a pretty obvious manner anywhere else (like overflow scrolling).
WebAssembly and WebRTC are the opposite of it. "Last year or so", maybe, but it'll take more than one year of good work for me to look at the team at a good light.