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Comment by judah | Hacker News Reader

Agreed that apps (web or native) shouldn't have free access to e.g. your contacts without permission.

But Apple goes beyond security and actually makes it impossible to build first-class experiences for iOS without paying $99/year + 33% in-app purchases. I think that's unfortunate.

The free and opened web presents a challenge to Apple's app business. They have a perverse incentive to keep web apps second-class citizens on iOS. And this is a major reason why iOS Safari has become the new Internet Explorer 6.

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> The free and opened web presents a challenge to Apple's app business.

The free and opened [sic] web is BS. The "web" was always free and open, if you had worthy and user-respecting stuff to publish. Autoplaying video and other similar features are just plain evil. And if web apps are second class citizens on iOS, that's really a nice thing to hear, IMnsHO, because they are second class citizens on the WWW itself. They are either castrated versions of the native applications they are pretending to be, or overtly bloated thin clients (i.e. glorified <form>s) anyways. There has been one web app that I've used and liked: the old Gmail app.

The requirements of the platform are quite clear, and the service in return is quite desirable (apps being reviewed before publishing, user-centric permissions scheme, etc.) and even though I don't own an iOS device ATM, it sounds quite desirable to me, at least over Android where there is a hundred million billion versions of the OS out there and nobody bothers sending update my way so that I can has some granular control over what I allow the apps do. If you don't like it, don't take it. And it's nothing like IE because nobody has to use iPhones whereas Microsoft had put its OS and its browser on almost every computer out there, and I bet older IE browsers still have more market share than the sum of devices online with Safari installed. They are just a little island of the technosphere that want to get what they paid for, and enjoy the web like it was meant to be, possibly; and I'm just like them with my Qutebrowser where I have to disable JS and maintain a whitelist because the free and open web. Gosh.

The free and open web is BS? Well, I disagree. That any person with the will and the skill can publish something for all the world to see, without the need for gatekeepers? That's incredible freedom the world has never before seen.

>> "Autoplaying video and other similar features are just plain evil."

I'm not even asking for that. My app is a music player in the vein of Pandora. iOS Safari doesn't let me play the next song if I'm not in the fore. Apple has acknowledged this is an issue; maybe they will fix it in a future version.

iOS Safari: As someone who has supported a web app (now PWA) for 7 years on iOS Safari, I say with knowledge and experience that yes, iOS Safari is the modern IE6. I say that because it is the slowest to adopt standard web features, and the reason for doing so is a business one. Both reflect 1990s IE and Microsoft.

You are confounding things here. The actual free and open web is certainly one of the best things ever. But all the app ecosystem we have built on it, the insecure and wasteful universe of web apps, and all the cruft that is created to support them in the name of free and open web, none of them are necessary for tye web to be free and open. Is the open web this whole business of tracking and data ransom? No. It is the content that people publish, and it needs only a fraction of all this complexity. The rest is the closed web. Nobody bars anybody from publishing proper application software or make usable web applications that do not require clients to have software that takes hundreds of megabytes on disk and multiple gigabytes on ram.

In thr nineties MS had almost 100 marketshare in consumer OS market. How much does Apple ecosystem has now. MS and Apple is incomparable in that you can prefer to not use an apple device, but for a long long time you could not prefer to not use the MS software, whatever consumer hardware you had.

Lemme get this straight: you're mad that a company you don't want to pay $99/yr to won't build APIs so you can make money on their platform.

So sad, lemme find my tiny violin.

I'm not mad at them. However their lack of support for industry standards is why I won't buy their product.

And again that's the free market at work. There are enough people who have a different set of priorities to make Apple a very successful company.

The ”free” market is not a sentient being.

And nowhere did I say it was. The fact is every company hopefully has a business plan to be profitable the numbers show that Apple has one of the best business plans to do so.

Same here, and if it wasn't bad enough other companies copy this terrible attitude.

Dinosaurs will die.

It's not their platform. The devices belong to the people who bought them.

Author here. I'm not making any money on their platform. I'm a non-profit, building a free app; this isn't about money.

I mentioned money in the post as a list of all barriers to moving a PWA to app store. $99/year + 33% in-app purchases (plus a $1000+ Mac to build, and probably one or more Mac minis for CI) is a barrier.

The bigger concern is Apple is lagging behind on web standards. I suspect the reason for that is because web apps undermine their app business; this is a replay of the 1990s when Microsoft lagged their browser behind web standards, knowing it undermined their business.

So, keep your violin, brother. :-) My post wasn't a complaint, but a documenting of the hurdles involved in moving a PWA to the app stores.

> I'm a non-profit

So the only thing that applies to you is the price to have access to a Mac. Since you're a nonprofit, Apple will waive your developer fee, and you wouldn't need in-app purchases anyways. Also, IIRC the cut Apple takes is 30%, not 33%, in line with the rest of their App Store policies.

"non-profit" doesn't mean "not selling things"

And it certainly doesn't mean it's not about money. Depends on the business, of course, but I've seen non-profits that pay million dollar salaries to employees and put millions in the bank as reserves. Fine with me but business is often about money; non-profit or otherwise.

>So the only thing that applies to you is the price to have access to a Mac.

"So the only thing that applies to you is not wanting to pay upwards of a thousand US dollars for yet another development machine."

As the article mentioned, they went with a $25 online Mac solution instead.

That's what I get for reading the comments before reading the piece, sorry.

I'm still uncomfortable with the extent to which Apple's walled garden is walled though. 25 USD/month does add up, even if you unsubscribe during months where you aren't using the service.

Macincloud also have pay by the hour solutions.

I have an account with them to do testing on different versions of macOS than the one installed on my development machine, and it only costs a few dollars a year.

> Since you're a nonprofit, Apple will waive your developer fee

I thought you meant charities, not non-profits, but TechCrunch reports the latter:

"Apple in early 2018 will waive the $99 developer fee for all government and nonprofits starting in the U.S. to make this transition easier."

https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/20/apple-revises-its-controve...

Author here. That's correct - Apple waived my $99/year fee. I documented that in the post. But my post wasn't about me, it was about the hurdles involved in getting a PWA into the app store. For many people, $99/year + 30% in-app purchases + $1000+ Mac for build and testing + a few Mac Minis for CI servers ...that is a barrier.

If you're of the scale where you need several CI servers for a platform, buying a computer for that platform should be a requirement anyway. The IAP cut is only an issue if you're making money on the app.

BTW, the best solution for your case is VS App Center (https://appcenter.ms), which has a free tier and does CI/CD (on Macs) across platforms.

> Apple is lagging behind on web standards.

Google’s bright ideas aren’t necessarily standards. Service workers are only a working draft, and only implemented in 2 of the major browsers.

Obviously Google and Apple have different priorities, and clearly service workers benefit Google more than the other vendors.

My understanding is that service workers have buy in from all four major browser vendors now, with implementations in all of them. I haven’t played with it yet but it seems like service workers are here to stay

https://caniuse.com/#feat=serviceworkers

And when will Push Notifications be implemented?

Maybe ask jon at apple

Just a note on style--your post reads as a complaint, whether you intended it that way or not. The strong editorial slant actually undermines the meat of the article for me, which is, as you mentioned, documenting the hurdles in publishing a PWA. You could make this a better resource by stripping out the overt anti-Apple editorializing. Let the facts speak for themselves--for those who agree with you. Which I don't. Apple is choosing a deliberate strategy here that privileges users over developers. You prefer that they privilege developers over users, but that's hardly a universal position.

There are two different arguments here, one very common and long lived that Apple is good at protecting users, and the other that Apple is not prioritizing the process for web developers. Maybe you are conflating them?

I don't think I am. I'm suggesting that much of what the OP takes as not prioritizing web apps is part of a deliberate strategy to protect users. I certainly could be wrong about Apple's motives, though.

> Apple is choosing a deliberate strategy here that privileges users over developers.

What is stopping them from doing both?

There's no reason developers should jump through arbitrary hoops to make their applications available to users. Yes, quality control, security, etc. is very important, but the publishing process should and can be as user friendly as their platform claims to be for end users, and that is what the article is showcasing.

FWIW I didn't notice any bias against Apple in the article. Just a lot of understandable frustration with their processes and platform.

Lines like this feel like bias to me:

> Web app restrictions by ~Apple~ hostile mobile platforms

Author here. That's my opinion based on experience. I have no axe to grind against Apple; I love their hardware and currently own a beautiful iPhone.

Their developer story needs work, especially around web apps.

>> your post reads as a complaint

Thanks for letting me know. I'll change my tone in future posts.

The only thing web apps undermine is user experience. And if it is PWA, why would you want app store anyway?

He doesn't want app store. The whole article is about how the author is forced to submit an app to the store just to allow playing audio in the background.

The author would prefer to just have a web app / website that plays audio, but it is not possible. On iOS, apparently you need to use Cordova and submit an app to the store if you want to play the next song while the app is in the background. And it is not possible to use lock screen controls to control playback (apart from stopping it).

as an iPhone user, I'm extraordinarily glad that the author cannot play audio at me from a website in the background.

Author here. I'm with you for random websites. But what about apps that are media players, ala Pandora? My app is a music playlist/radio station hybrid. It's expected to play music; it's the whole point of the app.

iOS Safari doesn't let me play audio until user interaction. OK, that's fair.

But it also blocks me from playing the next song when the current one ends. That's not cool. It breaks my app. It forced me to bundle my PWA as an app in the store, just to get around this restriction.

FYI, I reported this problem to Apple's iOS Safari team. They acknowledged the issue and said they can probably fix it in the future. (That was 2 years ago.)

I think you misunderstood something. Websites can play audio in the background on iOS. It works great for podcasts — but only as long as you don’t want to control playback. The API is there, Apple didn’t omit it on purpose. But it is broken.

Also: the author makes the point that mobile users have been conditioned to look in the app stores for stuff to use on their devices.

In other words, having a presence in app stores is important to marketing. And indeed, his new users per month rate went up after he listed in the actual app stores.

Nit : it’s 30% :)

The fact that they won't let you build apps for the app store on Linux makes me want to boycott them.

I hope they lose their dominant market position soon so everyone doesn't have to play by their rules.

This is a ridiculous comment unworthy of this community.

Safari doesn’t follow web standards that other browsers follow. That’s worthy of frustration. If they build a browser, they should implement standard APIs.

$99/yr plus buying an apple computing device.

Yes but given the current state of the App store, with the minor obstacle that is the $99/year, I hasten to imagine what the state of it would be without it!

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