Apple broke WebAssembly on iOS and are leaving it broken
scirra.com
scirra.com
> Confirmed resolved in iOS 11.3 beta 1.
> 3 days ago
Unless you think it's worth saving a few mbs of storage to have two instances for security and stability??
The thing is, that for 99% of the users, the defaults work wonderfully and allow them to be super productive without having to toy with their device like they used to have to in the Windows Mobile and Palm days.
But not even being able to update even the browser by itself shows an extreme level of incompetence.
Why would Apple go through the trouble of implementing a feature and then breaking it?
The promise of not needing native apps for mobile started with Apple in 2007, then Palm, RIM, and Microsoft. It's always been a poor user experience. It still is today on mobile - with apps that are just glorified web view wrappers and on the desktop with memory hogging, battery draining, slow Electron apps.
Google can do the same thing with its own devices and on Android One devices. Even so, updating just the browser automatically is clearly better than requiring the user to reboot. Since apps are required to deal gracefully with being restarted by the system arbitrarily, the user doesn't even notice. This allows Google to update the browser much faster than Apple even on non-Google devices.
All that talk about web apps vs. native is tangential to the point — that Apple, through sheer incompetence, ships a worse browser that is updated much more slowly than its competitors, allowing its competitors customers to have more and better apps than Apple's customers in a more secure browser. That Apple apologists even try to find some way to justify this just makes them look ridiculous.
This has been updated automatically without an OS update for years, and Apple still can't get it right. Worse, Apple requires apps to use their broken, rarely updated implementation. On Android, even Firefox can render pages for other apps with Gecko if the user prefers.
On the topic of Android One and Google vs. the rest, the smart user knows which phone they are getting, and the smart user prefers Android One and Google phones to iPhones and other rarely updated phones. It is not a choice between an Android phone selected uniformly at random (which in expectation is partially updated quickly and partially updated very slowly) and an iPhone (entirely updated slowly). That is a false dichotomy.
As far as "rarely updated", Apple is already beta testing 11.3 - 11.0 only came out in late September.
That also implies that there aren't any smart iPhone users at all. Logic! Apple and Samsung have shown that marketing works.
> As far as "rarely updated", Apple is already beta testing 11.3
Chrome, the default "Phone" app, and the default calendar app updated three days ago. The default keyboard app updated yesterday. Relative to that, iPhone updates at a glacial pace. Chrome Canary and Firefox Nightly update daily. Try to do that on an iPhone.
I think I would rather have rapid security updates than an update to the dialer....
As would I. Why have you chosen to use a platform with slow security updates then? Android One and Google phones get OS security updates on the same cadence as the iPhone and application security updates (including the browser) nearly immediately. The last iOS update alone had three slowly delivered WebKit fixes. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208463
> So are you now saying that Google that probably has more information on user behavior than any other company on Earth besides Facebook can't market?
Apple's clearly fooled you with its fast updates marketing. I consider Google to be very nearly incompetent at using the data it has to get more users. It was the first company to scale systems enough to log everything, but since then, many companies have figured out how to extract more dollar value out of their logs, while Google has done nothing useful business-wise.
https://www.recode.net/2017/10/4/16418170/google-pixel-marke...
And if those Android One phones are sold by carriers, they still aren't guaranteed to get timely updates. Even the Verizon Nexus phones didn't get timely updates back In the day.
Unless you're an expert in AI and data analytics or have some type of inside knowledge, it's hard to believe that Google isn't one of the best big data, AI companies in the world.
You're content to choose from three phones. I've given you 13 better phones. What does their market have to do with it? What do the hundreds of bad phones have to do with them?
> And if those Android One phones are sold by carriers, they still aren't guaranteed to get timely updates.
In general, don't buy your phone from a carrier, but this is no longer the case. https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/30/16225410/verizon-android-...
> Unless you're an expert in AI and data analytics or have some type of inside knowledge, it's hard to believe that Google isn't one of the best big data, AI companies in the world.
I never said that they don't know how to store and process big data. I called them out in my previous post for pioneering the field by actually storing all their logs. I just don't think they are any good at marketing or business intelligence, which is evident from all their fumbles.
Since browser updates don't require rebooting the entire system, they happen much more frequently on these other platforms. In the Android case, since the application model requires the app developer to recover gracefully from the system killing the application without warning, software updates happen with minimal distraction, even if the user is actively using the app being updated.
There may be another option, but in my experience, they want all apps to go through their store and have been almost belligerent to web devs in their mobile Safari/iOS development.
Edit: Or is this article inaccurate? The browser as a system update is such an obviously bad MS style thing to do, how was this repeated by Apple? How come so many people aren't completely baffled/angered by this decision?
Edit 2: It looks like a comment on the article says it's fixed in an iOS beta update coming soon...
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
So one can imagine that these heroic devs might attempt to get a better fix into a high-priority patch release - perhaps they even implemented and tested it in whatever passes for 20% time at Apple - and all it takes is one person up the chain to veto its inclusion in favor of a "just kill it to be safe" fix. It's incredibly easy to justify that "kill" in a scare-easy time such as post-Spectre, with everyone's eyes on major platforms, and nobody's going to expend that political capital. And eventually the fix lands in the next minor release, 11.3, at a time when doing so doesn't require those developers to overplay their hand. WebAssembly retreats from battle to fight another day. And the sun rises in the morning.
> Confirmed resolved in iOS 11.3 beta 1.