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Comment by kitsunesoba | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps it’s an unpopular opinion, but I’m hopeful that this doesn’t go anywhere for the simple fact that I don’t want to have to keep 5 different app stores installed to have access to everything. It would be cool to have an iOS equivalent of F-Droid, but I’d rather that not come at the cost of scattering commercial iOS apps across stores.

I’m not keen on the idea of non-WebKit web engines on iOS either because it will inevitably enable a huge contingent of lazy web developers to just display a “screw you and your device’s battery, go download Chrome” message rather than bother with crafting their sites and web apps in a web engine agnostic way. It’ll be just like when IE was the dominant browser, except this time around the dominant engine is favored by web devs and will continue to be thanks to Google’s web-centrism.

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I think its good to force Apple to allow non-WebKit web engines on iOS. Right now Apple can forcefully cripple technologies like progressive web apps by not supporting the latest web technologies. This allows Apple to force companies to develop native applications.

Similarly, Apple has been slacking off on improving Webkit and making it as good as V8. By getting rid of Apple's monopoly on web engines, developers will be able to push websites to new levels that are currently hard to attain.

I’d be more than happy for a WebKit browser with a fully customizable noscript and cookie policy.

As long as Safari remains the default or very popular, sites will probably have to support it anyway regardless of if other browser engines are available.

There's also some conflict of interest if say Chrome were to come to be the dominant browser on iOS since they also control Android. Would battery life, performance etc be prioritized as highly on iOS as their own platform?

I think it would be nice to be able to load apps from outside the app store especially on devices like the iPad Pro, but I think that's a separate issue from web standards. I think the only practical way to advance web standards is for the major browser vendors to agree and implement them, even if that sometimes takes a while.

> As long as Safari remains the default or very popular, sites will probably have to support it anyway regardless of if other browser engines are available.

But if another engine supports additional features that Safari doesn't, you could still offer those features to users of other browsers, i.e. you could do something like "install Chrome/Firefox to use our PWA".

> Would battery life, performance etc be prioritized as highly on iOS as their own platform?

Maybe not, but in that case people could switch back to Safari or another competitor like Firefox.

WebKit does support service workers now and they're working on support for Web App Manifests. Some web apps, like Kindle Web Reader work fine in offline mode on my iPhone, granted that site is using the older (deprecated) App Cache manifest.

> I don’t want to have to keep 5 different app stores installed to have access to everything.

The nice thing about F-Droid is that the repository format is open. So you only need one "app-store" app installed (F-Droid), then add multiple app sources that are each controlled by some app curator. For example, the "F-Droid repo", the "Guardian Project repo", the "copperhead OS repo", the "micro G repo", etc etc. This allows for a unified user experience without centralising app execution power in the hands of one organisation.

If you've used GNU/Linux this is exactly how package repos work (and what F-Droid was inspired by), since several decades before the term "App Store" was invented.

Why do you jump to the conclusion that this will cause 5 app stores to be necessary?

Android pretty much only has 3 (Google Play, Amazon, & F-Droid), and the large majority never use anything other than Google Play.

> Perhaps it’s an unpopular opinion, but I’m hopeful that this doesn’t go anywhere for the simple fact that I don’t want to have to keep 5 different app stores installed to have access to everything.

Ideally what should happen is that someone makes a Store app that will install apps from arbitrary distribution services. Then there is still one interface for installing apps, but competition for distribution/payment/curation services.

You're really in favor of Apple controlling what software can and cannot be run on your computers for convenience sake? Android allows multiple app stores and multiple browser engines and it hasn't caused the problem you fear at all. I can't think of a major app that is not available in the Google Play store.

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