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Comment by thyrox | Hacker News Reader

1. Killed flash because it's insecure and drains battery.

2. Crippled and never let PWAs fully work because security and battery.

Your hypothesis raises two slightly ugly questions - "Why could't Apple make those things work on their platform in the past?" and "What's changed in the security and battery aspects of PWAs that means Apple are now moving to support them?" If you look at the changes for iOS 15.4 there are a lot of things that improve support for PWAs. If you're right, and the reasons that they didn't support PWAs in the past are security and battery life, then the new changes in iOS presumably mean that Apple is intentionally crippling their platform's security to support PWAs. That's a scary move, and should make every Apple device owner somewhat concerned.

I think it's significantly more likely that the reason why they killed Flash and haven't supported PWAs is because they represented a threat to the App store, but now Apple believe that supporting PWAs doesn't do that (either because they believe PWAs can't compete with apps, or because they believe users will choose a platform that supports PWAs). There was nothing about PWAs that meant they couldn't be secure, or that they had to drain the device battery. Apple just chose not to support the features because they didn't want to, and not because they couldn't.

We don’t need to make stuff up about Apple’s reasoning on Flash — Steve Jobs was quite clear and quite public about it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple...

Steve's sixth and most important reason in that essay is "We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform."

That's Steve saying he wants to 'protect' the app store, and justify the 30% fee. If people could pump out Flash games it would have put Apple users off buying apps...

> 2. Crippled and never let PWAs fully work because security and battery.

How are PWAs insecure?

That one stuck out at me as well. The real reason is that it's a threat to their walled garden app store.

I can't tell if you're being serious or sarcastic.

Yeah, killing Flash at least was definitely a good thing. Not sure about the others! Strange comment.

This is off topic flame bait.

I'm sorry if my comment came off like that but my point is we don't need such lists and more walled gardens - where is the selection criteria for this?

Who decides these domains? Why does my domain not equal to a domain of my competitor? Does it put me at a disadvantage as a small player if I'm not on this list?

And this isn't just one instance but it keeps happening over and over.. Apps getting rejected from play store due to arbitrary standards while there is news of big cos like google making secret deals with apple to get exceptions and special advantages which the small guy can't (1)

(1) https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2021/09/04/appl...

I think what the OP is getting at is that Apple has a "secret" list of domains that it has approved for suggesting. There's no means by which we can get on to that list. In an open source browser, this list would be public, and assumedly there would be some way of submitting a change request.

All that said, I think this is a little overblown. I doubt many people go to one site over another based on the existence of this list.

Darwin is open source and there’s nothing you can do to get your patch in (unless you’re the upstream of a package they include, that is). Apple Podcasts directory is closed source and you can submit your podcast as you wish. Open source and a submission channel a la hstspreload.org are orthogonal. Anyway, this is a generic tangent.

Nowhere in their comment they mention the topic at hand, it's just a jab at controversial things Apple has done. It doesn't add anything to the post but causes outrage for the sake of it.

> The more I learn about open source the more i see their point..

Stallman is consistently mocked and diminished, but he is also consistently right.

...and we see what happens when we do the things he warns about in a consistent manner, yet people still continue to mock and ignore him.

Sad.

I never heard people mocking Stallman for his warnings about surveillance and curtailing user's freedoms.

But his behavior in public and the way he communicates is a completely different topic and a can of worms...

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