I wonder if mobile Safari domination is partly because iOS apps themselves use "Safari" when displaying webpages. If I tap an article using the Octal HN app, it opens in an internal "browser view" that is just an instance of Safari.
As a user Safari is fantastic and basically the whole reason I even own an iPhone. It’s just stupidly faster than Chrome on any Android flagship.
A world where there’s “choice” of browsers on every platform in practice just cements Chrome as the web because if you didn’t have to develop for Safari nobody would. On every other platform it’s “have bug-for-bug compatibility with Chrome or die.”
I wouldn't even bother owning an iOS device if it weren't for the third-party app selection (specifically for art production). Which is the most infuriating part: devs could do all of this stuff on Android, they just refuse to.
That's not fair. There are good reasons Android doesn't have art production apps. The biggest is that Android users don't pay for apps like that and devs like eating, but iOS has several other advantages like the Pencil, the better graphics APIs, the better graphics performance, etc.
This is more the result of Android being the budget option.
You make it sound as though developers have some grand scheme against Android. Devs do prioritize iOS, but if you want it to change you (and Google) should understand the reasons for it. ARKit vs ARCore is a great example.
Tango launched on a single phone that no one bought, it required specialized hardware, and it had serious performance issues. Google forged ahead with the hardware requirements for years, in which the market for Tango apps was zero. They gave it limited support and it was clearly not a priority. It was only after Apple launched ARKit all at once for every modern iDevice, in a big presentation to make it clear this would be a major iOS going forward, that Google killed off Tango and screwed over all the devs who had bought in (with a tweet, for the extra insult to injury). They launched ARCore instead, which still didn't run on the majority of Android phones and still didn't track as well as ARKit.
ARCore isn't the only time Google has behaved this way, it happens with nearly all of their efforts. Do you see why developers don't engage with these kinds of practices?
No, it's simply the same sort of tribalism that drives so much of American culture. The black-and-white, good-vs-evil format warring is nothing new; as always, it's driven by a kernel of legitimate difference and a whole lot of snowballing bias. What needs to happen is for developers to pull their heads out of their asses, realize just how enormous the Android market is, and supply experiences that justify paying for software (especially in a climate where most users don't see anywhere near the value they give in personal data returned in software utility).
>Tango launched on a single phone that no one bought
That doesn't matter. Tango was the cutting edge of mobile XR, which is a space that still won't be mature and profitable for years from now. The point would have been to get a jumpstart on developing port-able technologies and UX norms. Can you imagine how much more solid app development would have been if someone had showed up in 2003 and said, "In 10 years, multi-touch display smartphones will become the norm. Here's a dev kit that approximates what will be possible."? That's Tango. I don't know how you can argue that opportunities weren't missed or pushed back years because of this platform bias. Now the space is even contracting somewhat because Apple marketed ARKit (and forced Google to market ARCore) as a consumer-ready platform, and companies are realizing that it isn't (control isn't figured out, UX isn't figured out, applications aren't figured out; we're JUST getting the basic technology layer above ARKit/Core figured out). If we'd taken Tango seriously, we'd be so much farther ahead.
This goes for so much in the iOS/Android dynamic. It's dumb.
Not only is safari full of bugs, the bugs won't be fixed, and if they do, it will take years.
Current serious bugs: 1. Add a site to the home screen, go to another app for 20 seconds and then switch back: congratulations, it's frozen. 2. You can't even stop scrolling on the body element, so tens of thousands of developers resorts to ugly hacks like eg. https://github.com/willmcpo/body-scroll-lock that kinda works in some situations. 3. The lack of features. Who doesn't as a developer feel bad for the person who spends forever trying every single browser in apples app store in an attempt to find a browser that supports push notifications. Of course none of them do, it's all Apple's shit.
You really can't have much experience with web development if you don't know how terrible iOS is for web as a result of Safari.
Heck, Safari isn't even behaving close to Safari. You have safari on desktop, safari on iOS and safari standalone on iOS. All of them behaves completely different and has different bugs and feature support.