Coinbase Wallet to remove DApp browser to comply with Apple's policy

Cue the "But I like Apple running the app store with an iron fist! No malware and viruses!" comments. Unless the government forces Apple in the future to permit sideloading, this is never going to change.

Google doesn't have complete control. A significant number of Android devices ship without their store, and anyway, you can install apks with a checkbox in settings. Worst case, you ship to play store without this feature and mention in the support faq that you have to install the apk from a website download to have it.

Apple has slowly started to make things like that closer to being possible, but there are a lot more hoops, so it might be reasonable for a very niche app, buy anything you want thousands of people to use really needs to go through the app store.

In developing countries not everyone uses the Google Play Store

> Apple and Google have complete control over the mobile market

Apple does on the iOS market, Google doesn't on the Android market. Sure, they have most of the market, but there are decent alternatives like f-droid. Maybe if we can get enough people using alternative markets on Android we can think of pressuring Apple to allow third party apps, but until then it would be useless imo. Why aren't more people using f-droid?

Lets be honest. Its the same for Alipay's app too. They both are their own ecosystem and they are going to be allowed without a doubt, if Apple was to touch either of these Apps it would be seen as an offense to the red flag and I could easily see the mainlanders boycotting it.

Sounds like grounds for an antitrust case. You can point to special treatment of apps that risk Apple's position in foreign markets, where Apple is willing to bend its own rules to retain its market position.

Coinbase: please sue these cash fat rent-seeking clowns.

Does wechat allow users to make payments to each other? I wonder if that's what this is really about.

This isn't entirely true. Kik had their own app store for years: https://dev.kik.com/#/home

It just wasn't very popular, it seems...

On a desktop computer by far the most common "dApp browser" is MetaMask, which is merely a Chrome/Firefox extension. The mechanism is simply "a web browser" that gives the web page the ability (via some injected JavaScript object) to "request an Ethereum transaction be executed" (which costs money to do, and might even simply be the transfer of money). If it were possible to make browser extensions for MobileSafari people likely wouldn't bother making entire replacement browsers, as the experience is categorically worse.

Alternative browsers--built using Apple's browser--exist on the App Store; the issue here is that users are paying for something via a mechanism that isn't in-app purchases: Apple wants all payments in the world to flow through them, and so the idea of a decentralized payment future is incompatible with the App Store.

This is a fairly good explanation on stackexchange: https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/a/384

Excerpt (in the context of Ethereum, a smart contract platform):

> A DApp has its backend code running on a decentralized peer-to-peer network. Contrast this with an app where the backend code is running on centralized servers.

> A DApp can have frontend code and user interfaces written in any language (just like an app) that can make calls to its backend. Furthermore, its frontend can be hosted on decentralized storage such as Swarm or IPFS.

> If an app=frontend+server, since Ethereum contracts are code that runs on the global Ethereum decentralized peer-to-peer network, then: DApp = frontend + contracts

I made/am working on a DApp that does some stuff involving ANSI art as tokens with some additional properties that have rules that get enforced by the smart contract, which is essentially the back end. While the site sort of functions without being connected to the blockchain (there's a crappy database backed backend too), there is an entirely different set of data that's stored there that is not entirely in my control - only so much as the smart contract/backend coding permits once deployed to the Blockchain Virtual Machine.

Instead of talking to an API connected to a database, it's connected to an ABI talking to the blockchain. Someone could directly interface with that, or use my client, or build their own etc, it's open on the blockchain. Read operations are free unless specified, write operations generally have an implicit cost of the smart contracts currency at least with what I've used, which was Ethereum.

You can create front facing software that only interfaces with blockchain(s). To create a wallet you create a pub + private key pair. You can then sign tx's with that. A DApp can enable transfer of assets between addresses, calling smart contract functions in deployed smart contracts, and the frontend keeps you updated on the tx statuses. Essentially they are created for privacy and security reasons, and to execute scripting code from a mobile app, which is stored at a deployed smart contract address. I'm not sure what Apple's motivation is here, compliance or legal issues would probably be their biggest complaint? Or is this their attempt to squash an app store within their App Store?

dApp is kind of a flexible word, but the typical unifying feature is that the user has custody of a private key they use for signing transactions on a distributed ledger.

Most dApps (at least the ones you access through a dApp browser) have UIs built using regular web technology, and served over http.

As for why Google/Apple are doing this, I can only imagine that it threatens their walled garden by giving web users more access to payments that they'd rather monetize.

If you ever tried to develop software on phones before the iPhone, you'd understand. A buddy and I developed a pretty cool 'Cocktail App' for the Danger Hiptop.

After many months of frustratingly going back and forth, we were not able to get it onto the Hiptop app store because the carrier (T-Mobile) did not want to be responsible for someone using a recipe to make a simple bar drink and then going off and killing someone. They eventually added a 21+ category and we still couldn't get it onto the store. Never mind the fact that someone could just use the installed web browser to view the same exact content.

Of course you'd think that we should have known that we might get rejected... but the issue was that Danger couldn't even talk to the carrier until the app was written and they could physically show it to them. So it was one of those things where we knew the app might get rejected, but we took the risk anyway. It was a good learning experience.

So yes, this weird stuff around getting software onto phones has been going on for a long time. Apple was one of the first to take the control away from the telco. I don't know if that is better or worse, but it changed the economics substantially.

Because it was innovating... 13 years ago.

There's nothing stopping you from throwing a DeFi interface on a local web server. Built for web doesn't mean web exclusive.

The language around this changes constantly and currently says something about not emulating multi-app widget experiences.

> Remember when Microsoft sued OpenOffice for building a functional free competitor? Or when Sun sued Python?

They never did. They never did.

Both companies did some evil things in the 90s and 00s (Microsoft arguably much worse than Sun) but not what you described here. There were some worries from words that Microsoft might sue OpenOffice users. Sun never sued "Python" (you cannot sue a programming language, for starters).

..and why specifically Ubuntu Touch? There are other FOSS options available. Ubuntu Touch never took off, and is now a community project. Even Windows Phone failed. I put my money on Sailfish OS as platform #3 (if we ignore KaiOS) which is partly FOSS. Why SFOS? Because it will get adoption in non-Western markets such as Russia and India. Countries don't want to be dependent on US proprietary code because it isn't auditable, and these companies in the end do what the US government asks or demands them to do. I'm also curious what is going to happen with the Chinese Android fork led by Huawei.