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Comment by anonu | Hacker News Reader

Also, what we call "mobile" is actually just 2 nice walled gardens with doors called "App Store" and "Play Store".

That's at least another reason why the web is not pervasive on mobile: Apple and Google are quite happy that it's not that way because they can monetize their platforms with far more control than through the browser.

The article references app stores pointing out that they reduced user friction in payments and subscriptions around apps. Of course, under the guise of user experience you can focus your development efforts on native tool chains and not invest in the mobile browser experience.

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That's right. Web standards are spearheaded by Google, while Apple's job is to make sure they don't work on iOS.

Tell me, why does Apple need to do exactly what Google does? I thought we liked different ideas and competition ‘round these parts?

Apple just doesn't do it in any way. There's no way to permamently store data on Safari. At least Google Chrome has the File writer API (even though it would be good to have permament IndexedDB storage as well).

IIRC you can permanently store information under iOS Safari if the site is installed as a PWA, which makes some amount of sense. By associating long term storage with the intentional action of adding to Home Screen, sites are prevented from storing things without user permission and the feature's capability as a method of fingerprinting is greatly reduced.

Apple has gimped PWA support for iOS. It’s support and lack of features is atrocious.

Yeah, but Microsoft is equally unhappy about windows native software going extinct and being strong armed to use google chrome engine for their edge browser !

A good open successor to flash would have made the app stores much less appealing. But that never happened.

I worked with a company middle of last decade that had to port its Flash content to Canvas and friends, its not even close the power Flash provided, not to mention the content development ecosystem surrounding Animate. Like, yeah, go ahead and export Canvas content from Animate, but be prepared for highly unoptimized Canvas runtime code.

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