I don't like this approach, but it is very consistent in their products, features tend to disappear over time and new ones only pop up if they're very sexy and can be announced on-stage.
“My search no longer works!” “Sir you have the search registry key set to ‘turkey bake time’”
“Well that’s what I was searching for, and then the search stopped working completely. iPhones are the worst, I’m gonna tell all my friends”
For example, my family member is a smart woman and I used to teach professionally. I haven’t yet found a way to teach her what a web browser is and isn’t.
This is relevant to the things she wants to get done (e.g. shortcuts don’t run in webview, gmail’s native app doesn’t support recipient groups but the web app does, etc)
After warmup, examples, Socratic questioning, task assignments, checking understanding and testing (with detailed feedback), it seems she approximately learns what a web browser is and when she is and isn’t in one, but then she doesn’t really understand it a couple days later.
She’s otherwise as clever and capable as everybody else or rather more clever.
At Apple’s scale, every added feature to a web browser adds thousands of clever people quitting in confusion.
That’s why they hide things like search engine selection under menus an average user will never see, even if accidentally pressing 37 not-quite-randomly wrong things during a session.
We here have the curse of expertise.
The best Apple UX can do for the majority of the population is say no to features more often than yes, and to hide deep under the hood any setting that persists after the device is restarted and could lead to confused angry consumers that can’t figure out what to do and don’t have nearby family members to solve it before they quit.
Likely the best bet would be a web extension manifest value to expose a potential search engine. That would mean on iOS that you still need to publish an app for your search engine option to show up.
[1] Due to circumstances, I have needed to demo a certain location web app to quite a few people. I am not exaggerating.
If the user rejected Safari's access to location, sites also will also not get location data. However, Safari has asked me for access the first time on several phone installs, so I believe Safari not having location services is still a user choosing to limit platform access at some point during setup or on demand in Safari.
Unfortunately the public often does not trust even the platform vendor with location access. I somewhat blame Google for leading the public narrative to that point - but it is admittedly a very easy topic to fearmonger about.
(Said as someone who often has to restore location access to Apple and Google maps on family members' phones as part of troubleshooting issues)