Apple can just point to mobile Safari. There is nothing stopping you from building whatever you want on the web these days.
Section III is the missing piece of the legal puzzle for me. I have in the past been convinced that the presence of Android is sufficient to prevent a lawsuit like this from succeeding against Apple. But now I'm not so sure.
III. Competition in the Sale of Mobile Devices Cannot Discipline Apple’s Conduct in the iOS App Distribution or iOS In-App Payment Processing Markets. 156. Competition in the sale of mobile devices cannot constrain Apple’s anti-competitive conduct described in Parts I and II. 157. First, Apple’s power in the relevant markets described above is not disciplined by competition in the sale of mobile devices because Apple mobile device customers face significant switching costs and customer lock-in to Apple’s iOS ecosystem.
How many news articles have we seen about the power of iMessage to keep people in the Apple ecosystem? It's gonna be hard for Apple to argue that they don't try to engender consumer lock in given their plain reluctance to interoperate and all the news articles talking about how strong this effect is.
I think Epic has a chance here. Certainly it's a gamble I'd love to see them win. IANAL.
And thank God for that! I don't want websites in Safari to have the APIs available to a native app!
Nope, not at all. You want 3rd party app stores because:
1) you don't believe Apple's walled garden is worth a 30% cut
2) you dislike Apple's lack of transparency in their app review procedures
3) you're unable to sideload an app onto your "customer's" devices
One or more of those are why you "need" third party app stores. And, I think you've got a valid argument for any of them. But none of those have anything to do with what APIs are available to websites in Safari.
If Apple is forced to allow third-party stores, it should also be forced to allow third-party push notifications.
Especially ones like push notifications which in many cases are harmful to consumers.
Every push notification goes through Apple servers only.
They’d have to build a feature into iOS to allow it to maintain persistent connections to other notification services.
Apple does not allow non-Apple apps...
There are a multitude of cases where Apple apps have different rules, access to different APIs than you or I.
The "correctness" of this (morally/ethically/legally) is a separate debate I'm not entering into, but there is a distinction.
The larger issue though is that Apple will probably break those apps frequently as private API has no guarantees.
"The WebRTC APIs have not yet been exposed to iOS browsers using WKWebView . In practice, this means that your web-based WebRTC application will only work in Safari on iOS, and not in any other browser the user may have installed (Chrome, for example), nor in an 'in-app' version of Safari.Sep 7, 2018"
Im sure there are more examples.
ummm Safari stops you given it is a terrible browser, and is non-compatible with many modern features