> How is Apple allowed to disallow any other web browsers on their mobile devices?
They now allow it by the way. I don't know why. I am using Firefox on iOS and it was supported for at least half a year AFAIK.
Your point still stands obviously.
They now allow it by the way. I don't know why. I am using Firefox on iOS and it was supported for at least half a year AFAIK.
Your point still stands obviously.
One could claim since Apple IS the iOS market, for them to disallow competitors in certain app categories but not others, they are indeed abusing their position as a market owner, especially since they are the only one allowed (by them) to develop a browser engine.
This is what PWA really boils down to isn’t it. It’s not about standards or openness it’s about money. It’s about bypassing the App Store to do whatever the fuck you want.
As to your other point, yes if Safari started doing anti-privacy things, I would ditch the iPhone and go Android. Right now, they seem to be supporting my privacy.
Same goes for Apple - with no ability to build an alternative browser engine the market IS handicapped, especially since Apple is abusing this restriction to prevent web applications from competing with applications from which they charge tax on every single monetary transaction.
Apple on the other hand are preventing alternative rendering engines. It’s a very different situation. That’s not to say that it isn’t problematic, but it not as simple or as cut and dried as “but Microsoft and IE!?!”
Right now, Fortnite.
Got a better example?
And Apple has the moral high ground wanting a cut of proceeds because they make it easy for children to get to the casino? Not a great analogy.
Rent seeking on things you find immoral?
> Perhaps Epic didn't want to abide by these rules and used the fees as a cover?
Is this something Apple has alleged? Because otherwise it looks like you're speculating wildly to appeal to emotion. "It's ok because maybe they're bad people."
I did say perhaps which, last I checked, is a sign of a rhetorical thought.
Apple is not perfect, I don't like Apple, but epic is selling crack to kids in my community. at least apple keeps intermediaries between them and their child slaves. I'm not taking sides here. All these huge companies are deplorable and should never have been allowed to grow so large.
> android is just handicapped because I can't run a different OS, or screw around in the OS and change things to my whims
You totally can. I've been running LineageOS for a while, it's great. Improves my battery life, allows me to quarantine apps, gives me more access to the firewall for adblocking, and lets me get rid of cruft like the launcher. You can even completely de-Google Android, or install a community-maintained shim called MicroG that enables some of the features without the tracking.
The Android situation could be much better, this is why some people are excited about Linux phones. But I don't know a ton of Android users who are clambering to make it harder to use storefronts like F-Droid. I literally can not imagine going to a phone platform that didn't support NewPipe, I watch too many videos on my device, using the official Youtube apps would degrade the experience way too much.
I do think that the number of Android-exclusive things you can do is much lower than it used to be. It used to be pretty easy to make a compelling case that if you cared about flexibility at all, you bought an Android phone. I don't think that's the case anymore. But Apple still hasn't really stopped being Apple, so while the differences have become a lot less glaring, they also haven't completely disappeared. And sure, you can get some of this functionality back by jailbreaking, but in comparison the vast majority of the stuff you do on Android won't require root access, and all of the apps I listed above can be installed on a stock Android device without flashing or breaking anything at all.
Whether or not iOS users actually care about that stuff... :shrug: I suspect many of them don't. I'm not going to try and make a giant case about whether your average person on the street wants to be able to emulate Gamecube games on their phone. But I also don't really care; I'm a consumer and I want to be able to emulate Gamecube games on my phone. I'm a consumer, and I want to be able to install alternative Youtube front-ends that increase my privacy. I want to be able to block ads in my browser.
At the moment, Android provides an alternative for me. I'm very lucky that I never got locked into Apple's ecosystem so I don't have to make a choice between losing access to my credit card and being able to have a user-respecting Youtube client. But if you are locked into Apple's ecosystem, making a switch between phone platforms can be really prohibitively expensive and time consuming, so I sympathize with people who are in that position.
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[0]: To be fair IFTT is pretty good, but it just can't offer the same level of functionality.
[1]: I know someone will jump in on this, but adblocking in Safari is just not comparable to Firefox. There is no way to get what I would consider to be adequate adblocking on the web in iOS.
[2]: Microsoft/Nvidia have only been able to launch on iOS using webapps, which given Safari's current limitations are arguably a worse experience than having native apps.
To say that you can just install lineage is disingenuous. I've never had an android phone that allowed custom ROMs at launch so my argument stands against these phone manufacturers as much as they do against Apple.
Simply, my perspective is that people are going too hard on apple and not hard enough on Google. They both need to be broken up and forced to allow more programs on the products they sell. Epic is tainting the argument and trying to disingenuously spin their self interests as a benefit for consumers.
> I've never had an android phone that allowed custom ROMs at launch
Valid concern, but this is less a Google problem and more a hardware problem. Google isn't doing anything to block LineageOS, it just takes time to support the new hardware. You'll see the same problem with consumer laptops and Linux. This is why we have increasing movement to try and get Open hardware/firmware. Nevertheless, the situation with LineageOS is still comparatively much better than it is on Apple hardware. At least with LineageOS, you don't need to find a jailbreak to get it working.
Part of the reason Apple dominates these conversations is because it's the most obvious, clear example of what we're talking about -- not because the situation on Android is ideal or because we wouldn't like the Android situation to be better. Check out the discussions about the Librem 5/Pinephone if you're interested in getting involved in the effort to make hardware compatibility better in general.
> epic seems to be dominating the discussion
It's not so much that everything revolves around Fortnite, it's just that Epic is currently one of the biggest forces in play surrounding antitrust. It's a bit like how Google and Oracle dominated the conversation around API Copyright -- not because Google was a saintly company, but because they were currently arguing about it in front of a judge, and that's a newsworthy event that might have large effects on the industry.
That being said, I'm also a little bit confused about why you're voicing this objection here, because this article doesn't mention Epic at all, and outside the comment thread that you started, I don't really see anywhere else in the comments where anyone has brought Epic up. Fortnite was 1 out of 10 apps that I mentioned in a comment thread that was originally talking about Apple's refusal to allow alternative browsers like Firefox. So while Epic is certainly getting a lot of coverage in general, it's not like nothing else is being talked about. I certainly didn't zero in on Epic in my comment other than to list Fortnite as one of multiple examples of apps some consumers might care about.
On the note of "unequal coverage", it's also worth mentioning that the legislative effort being covered in this article is targeting both Apple and Google and would affect both companies equally. So I'm not even sure it's accurate for you to say that Google is getting a free pass legally. The Judiciary Committee is certainly not ignoring Google right now.
If Apple didn't position itself as privacy-focused, then not allowing other browsers would be clearly violation, but if this is basically part of the product description - and many people buy iPhones in the first place because they don't want or case about other browsers - they want safety - why should Apple be forced to do it?
When there's articulable harm.
Microsoft forcing the junk that was IE, and all their other thuggish tactics, is articulable.
The differences between chrome and safari are insignificant enough that you'll bore most people when trying to superficially explain how pretty much the only people negatively effected are advertisers, who have been avoiding their public reckoning over the straight up horrific things they do in closed rooms.
Maybe I'm wrong and there are consumers that harmed by the lack of chrome or Firefox on ios, but that'd be news to me.
Well, developers of modern web apps can offer a qualitatively better experience on those other platforms in some ways than they can with iOS Safari. The offline working features are one clear example. The use of open (=> cheaper and sometimes better-performing) standards for things like audio and video content is another.
Unless you contend that the only reason any web developer ever uses the features available in other browsers but not iOS Safari is to abuse or exploit users, in other words that no-one is (or would, if Apple supported them) make any legitimate use of those features that would improve the user's experience in some way, it is clear that users are materially disadvantaged by the limitations of iOS Safari, unless they have the choice to use another browser that does offer those features instead.
Users don't object to a lot of things when either they aren't aware of them or they believe they can't do anything about them. That doesn't mean they aren't still being harmed.
So yes, you're using Firefox, but you're still using the same rendering engine for your browser, as any other browser on iOS. Effectively limiting how powerful browsers can be on iOS, as Apple has full control over Webkit and doesn't allow anything else, literally anti-competitive behavior.
With this in mind, when you’re asking for alternative rendering engines, you’re really asking for Google to be able to get their hooks into iOS. It would be nice if Mozilla were free to develop their own engine but that’s not without downside and the most likely outcome is an iOS dominated by Chrome and ad-tracking.
The impacts go beyond iOS. The reality is that Safari is the only thing standing in the way of Google having IE-style dominance of browser usage share. As of now, Chromium has just under 80% usage share. If Chromium were as dominant as iOS as it is on desktop, it’s usage share would likely exceed 90%
Alternate engines are a fine idea in principle, but we need to consider whether a Chromium monopoly on the web is indeed an improvement from the status quo.