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Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

This particular move takes something that is possible in web applications today and makes it not possible in the future (offline capable frontend-only applications), making the gap between native applications and browser applications further, so developers who need to build apps that works offline on iPhone, will only be able to use Apples own technologies for doing so, in a non-cross-platform way. Which in general, is what Apple always been favoring.

Google Docs doesn't really work offline, so it's not impacted by this change. Could also be a change of heart from Apple, since their stance on web applications have changed before.

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It could also be exactly what they say it is: a way to prevent the abuse of local storage for tracking.

People who want to track users will always find a way to do so, it's a endless cat-and-mouse game. Now they will just use cookies instead... The only way to win this is to legislate away the freedom to track users by using privacy-invasive methods. That's the only way that will work long-term. But that'll make half of the internet industry disappear, along with it's shareholders, so it's unlikely to happen.

> People who want to track users will always find a way to do so, it's a endless cat-and-mouse game. Now they will just use cookies instead...

Isn't the new policy for local storage being copied from an existing policy for cookies? How can they switch to cookies?

Arbitrary government rules are never the solution for issues.

Now I'm not a native English speaker, but seems "arbitrary" means "determined by chance, whim, or impulse, and not by necessity, reason, or principle". Introducing a law to protect peoples privacy would not be arbitrary, especially since most countries have a due process for introducing laws.

> Now they will just use cookies instead

In the linked article it actually mentions that this policy is being widened from cookies to the rest of script-writable storage.

It's both.

They could restrict these APIs to "installed" web apps via the web app manifest file, if they were to adopt that. Maybe they will in the future, but for now they've just made web apps far less powerful.

> Google Docs doesn't really work offline

It actually works quite well offline

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