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Comment by anhner | Hacker News Reader

No iOS version means a no go for me, since I like to use the same browser for mobile and desktop.

There's a guy in their forums saying two years ago that "iPhone usage will drop to mac level usage (~8%)"[1], which is laughable.

[1] https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/31772/mobile-vivaldi-for-ios...

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Globally, Android has 85% market share, with iOS around 15% market share [1].

There are still billions users without smartphones in the world (especially in Africa and India), and most of them will be getting Android devices.

[1] https://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/os

>(especially in Africa and India)

77% of Indians use a smartphone, won't say billions

The claim is that there are billions of users total without smartphones, not billions in each of Africa and India

I see different market share on statcounter[1], but both in their data and the one you provided, iOS usage has grown these past years

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/worldw...

Apple only allows Safari reskins, doesn't it?

Roughly speaking, yes. Alternative browsers for iOS can offer a different UI or a different way of handling bookmarks, but they're always powered by the same rendering engine and JavaScript engine that Safari uses. Apple even seems to forbid extending the capabilities of WebKit and JavaScript Core, presumably you wouldn't be permitted to add support for additional video codecs for instance. [0]

The only exception is Opera Mini, which is a frontend for Opera's cloud-based HTML rendering infrastructure, [1] so it doesn't count as a browser under Apple's rules. (Opera Mini for iOS has been discontinued.)

[0] https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#thi...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Mini

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