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Comment by evanriley | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand these articles that are coming out recently, and I don't want to seem like I'm attacking the people who use these tools...

But, its starting to feel like the people who want to use tools that allow them to build apps and programs that are cross-platform (NodeJS, Electronc, etc) are trying to use their weight as "the most popular programming language" to get platforms to conform to whatever they want.

Why should Chromium be allowed to use private APIs that native developers already knew "should NOT be allowed" especially those coming from iOS where its known using those would simply have your app rejected.

I don't have as much of an issue with Electron apps as most people do, but at some point you have to realize the short comings of cross-platform dev tools and work around them instead of trying to force everyone to just accept them.

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> Why should Chromium be allowed to use private APIs that native developers already knew "should NOT be allowed" especially those coming from iOS where its known using those would simply have your app rejected.

Why should apple apps like Safari be allowed to use private APIs if they're not allowed?

This is blatantly non-competitive.

Also, they sit on these APIs for YEARS with no alternative.

Because they are not a monopoly so those laws don't apply to them.

This has never been a good argument if you look at what happens inside an ecosystem owned by a trillion dollar business.

So in that case the Amazon Fire tablet is a “monopoly” since it’s owned by a 1 trillion dollar company....

You do not have to be a monopoly to be in violation of anti-competitive business practice regulations.

Because you don’t pay Apple to perform the necessary engineering investment to expose SPI as API. And the people who do pay Apple don’t care about this.

Where is the price sheet for the SPIs Electron is using?

I think every single platform is struggling with this. Even Electron or Chromium itself. They all have internal or private APIs or things that are not ready for prime time or just plain internal details.

Opening up private APIs is a commitment that you will support those. Which is no light decision.

Personally I think it is fine for any platform to have these.

But I do wish that the App Store rules around them were more permissive.

From Apples perspective: look at all the shit they are getting for dropping 64-bit support. This was known for a decade and they still are pictured as the bad guys who don’t support developers. A decade!

So you can imagine what happens when apps relying on private APIs suddenly break.

To be fair, Apple struggles with maintaining their existing APIs. Who cares about the private ones, they probably break or change just as unexpectedly as the public ones.

False equivalency. Changing private APIs without warning is not the same as actively breaking clients.

You know all the talk about Google or Facebook or Comcast both owning the platform and competing on the content layer with self-dealing is anti-competitive monopolistic behavior? Same goes for Microsoft Windows in the 1990s (actually litigated these very issues) and Apple today.

False equivalency. Changing private APIs without warning is not the same as actively breaking clients.

This distinction does not matter in the public sphere. When Apple releases an update — any update — that breaks a popular app, they are blamed for it. By putting their foot down, Apple is putting the onus back on developers to play by their rules.

This situation is essentially the normalization of deviance [1]. If you do not enforce a rule, that rule becomes invalid and unenforceable. Apple does not want to lose control of their platform. If they give away all of their private, low level APIs, then cross platform frameworks like Electron will render their platform a commodity.

[1] http://danluu.com/wat/

Do you mean 32 bit support instead?

Safari doesn't use private APIs. WebKit does.

And WebKit is a fundamental OSX library used for many purposes.

Yeah sure technically correct. But both ship with macOS and both are built by the same trillion dollar company who owns the whole ecosystem.

Electron could in theory use WebKit as well, and the main reason it doesn't is because Google decided to fork WebKit.

I don’t think it actually can because WebKit on macOS has been replaced by WKWebView which has a severely limited API surface that without doubt is way too shallow for Electron.

Safari totally uses private APIs, just not for web rendering.

Also every "browser" on iOS has to be based on their webkit. So there is only a single browser implementation. And worse even, they purposely prevent royalty-free (WP9, AV1) codec support (they receive money from HEVC licensing fees), among other things. I remember days where they didn't even support file uploads.

> use their weight as "the most popular programming language" to get platforms to conform to whatever they want

I'd rather have an open committee tell a big corp what they have to do than the other way around.

JavaScript's tribe is more accurately represented as a swarm, not a committee. They are unable to tell anyone what to do.

I was thinking about tc39 and the open js foundation.

The idea that all of the web is designed by an open committee is laughable. How much of the web is simply controlled now by Google doing whatever is wants in Chrome?

Cross-platform apps isn't really the point though. It's about openness. Native Android, for example, is Java. Java tools are plentiful and open source. Android dev tools work on Macs, Windows, Linux. Google also invests heavily in Chrome allowing for robust apps that don't require an app install at all.

Compare that to Apple who rule the App Store with an iron fist. The don't allow native Chrome at all requiring instead that Google deploy a reskinned Safari. You can't deploy an app to a phone that you own unless you also own a Mac workstation running OS X and pay Apple $100/year for the privilege of using the very expensive hardware you bought from them. They built Swift, they built Xcode. It's total vertical integration and it's all managed at the pleasure of their bottom line.

Is that correct? Is there a Mac App Store rule that says “thou shall use WebKit” ?

Do note that the point on macOS is kind of moot because it IS an open platform. Unlike iOS you do not have to use the App Store.

Yes. And it was crippled for a long while outside of Safari.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/01/new-chrome-for-ios-i...

That's with regard to iOS, not the Mac App Store.

I don't get it. You can deploy apps when you pay both Google and Apple or you can work without a paid subscription if you are just a developer dabbling at home.

The vertical integration is true but that also has been the case with Microsoft products. Google basically doesn't have it's own desktop platform until pretty recently, of course their tools ran on other desktop platforms otherwise they wouldn't have any.

It's nice to install other browsers on Android though. Using Firefox wherever I can.

If people want openness they can always buy Android. In fact most people do.

The whole point of different platforms is that they have different characteristics.

Openness is a characteristic of Android but not of Apple’s stores.

This means there will be limitations on what cross-platform software can do.

This strategy improves their bottom line because it enables products that users are more willing to spend money on.

> and it’s all managed at the pleasure of their bottom line.

As if Android’s come-one come-all is done out of benevolence. Google doesn’t have a heart, it had a bottom line too, and supporting those tools makes dollars come its way.

Google HAD an opportunity to ensure that one browser engine ruled the web—-but they chose to fork WebKit into Blink, in part _because_ they didn’t want to share the work they were doing. It propped up competitors. Google would rather have a competitive—-read, monetary—-advantage than ensure web technology is widely available for all to use.

For example, when Google refused to share the multi-process mode that differentiated Chrome from other browsers, it was a compelling enough security feature that Apple/WebKit reimplemented it independently so that everyone using WebKit could have it.

Google proceeded to cry crocodile tears, and then promptly forked the WebKit codebase into Blink. They claimed it was necessary to avoid having to carry around two multi-process models, but it was a A PROBLEM OF THEIR OWN MAKING.

So don’t imply Apple is profiteering, as if other companies are trying to give you hugs. Everybody’s finding cash in the ways that play to their strengths.

If Google was really interested in pushing the web forward, they’d swallow their pride, take the bottom line hit, and merge Blink back into WebKit.

> Google HAD an opportunity to ensure that one browser engine ruled the web—-but they chose to fork WebKit into Blink, in part _because_ they didn’t want to share the work they were doing.

Apple had the same choice when it forked KHTML to produce Webkit.

KHTML wasn’t anywhere near the same position as WebKit when Apple forked it. At the time, KHTML was niche beyond its use in KDE.

When Google forked WebKit, Safari and Chrome combined were something like 40% of the market.

so?

Chrome was clearly the leader. Apple should have moved to their fork then if anything.

> but they chose to fork WebKit into Blink, in part _because_ they didn’t want to share the work they were doing

I believe that statement is false. As I understand it, from @tomalsky, Google simply had a different (superior) design for making WebKit multi-process, and Apple did NOT want to take those changes upstream into WebKit. So if Google wanted to use the better design, they had to fork.

According to this link:

https://www.osnews.com/story/23133/apple-drops-webkit-2-code...

Large parts of Chrome’s multi-process model were specific to Chrome, and not part into WebKit. Apple built “WebKit 2”, which integrated into WebKit at a higher level and allowed anyone using WebKit to get multi-process as a native part of the code base.

Three years later, Google forked Blink. According to this link:

https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/03/google-forks-webkit-and-la...

“Specifically, [Google Engineering VP Alex] Komoroske noted, Chromium’s multi-process architecture is very different from the rest of WebKit (Chromium is the open-source project behind Chrome and Chrome OS). Having to integrate Google’s way of doing things with WebKit and what the rest of the WebKit partners were doing was “slowing everybody down,” Komoroske said.”

So, basically, Google built a version which was partially proprietary; Apple came in and built a completely open source version; and rather than standardize on a single code base, Google bailed, claiming it was too difficult to continue supporting two different multi-process models.

In the end, rather than collaborate, Google chose to keep their product proprietary and create a forked code base instead of doing the right, but admittedly difficult, thing and adopting the true open source option.

Google shipped their multi-process implementation years before Apple’s huge re-architecture of WebKit (which many forget now but lead to incredibly buggy behavior for years too).

They were able to ship earlier, and arguably at all, precisely because they just made separate processes that each had WebKit in them instead of doing a major change inside of WebKit. Had they tried to do the latter, the fork would have just happened sooner since everyone would have screamed that they were trying to completely change WebKit as complete newcomers: don’t forget, this was the major feature they shipped Chrome with. I’m personally happy that they set the standard that everyone then followed back in 2008 as opposed to having their initial foray into the browser space be some big RFC to change WebKit.

Having worked with it at the time, I was initially skeptical too. However, after working in the code, it definitely felt more natural to have the processes around WebKit instead of inside WebKit (as would be the case with most libraries). Ultimately, Apple’s approach took longer and lead to a big API-incompatible change (A “fork” level change arguably, but when it’s your own repo it’s not a fork, it’s just “2 point 0”). Not saying that’s bad, but Google's goal was to ship Chrome in 2008 and not have some huge incompatible diff with WebKit. Both made decisions appropriate to them, and in the end, gasp, we got two cool multi-process implementations, what a failure story for open source!

This whole storm about macOS. Which is an extremely open platform. You can develop apps with amazing tools by Apple or you can do C, C++, Ruby, Java, Electron you name it. You don’t even have to pay anyone money to build an app and share it.

There are a lot of misconceptions in this thread and claiming that macOS is not open is really the biggest IMO.

The OP is literally about Apple locking down a Mac API.

But only for App Store apps.

The platform is still wide open for non-App-Store development.

> You can't deploy an app to a phone that you own unless you also own a Mac workstation running OS X and pay Apple $100/year for the privilege of using the very expensive hardware you bought from them.

This hasn’t been true for a while now.

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