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Comment by cronix | Hacker News Reader

I'm pleasantly surprised by this news. I never thought Apple would do this and have been quite critical of them over the years due to it. For years they've really been holding up progress with PWA. I think a majority of the apps we see are really just glorified wrappers around websites anyway, or not needing more resources/tech than a website would, except bloated up to 100megs for each app because we can't just use the web browser already installed and all of the time and money wasted getting it into the app store when it should be just freely accessible via the web.

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> I'm pleasantly surprised by this news. I never thought Apple would do this and have been quite critical of them over the years due to it.

The EU is forcing them to allow side loading so they are racing against the clock to try to bring WebKit to a point where everyone is not just going to switch to Chrome overnight when that happens.

99.9% of people would not switch to Chrome overnight. They don’t know or care what a rendering engine is.

They don’t need to know. They just need to click on the banner which will be on every Google search result pages. How do you think Chrome got its market share on the desktop?

I really wish I could get google to shut up about logging in to my Google account and/or download chrome.

When I use safari on my work device, I don’t want to sign in. I don’t want to download chrome.

They’re so incessant with their pushing of the browsers. It’s easier to just give in than to deal with their pestering.

There's nothing stopping that from happening now. Chrome has been available on iOS for a long long time.

4.47% of them don't have to - they're already on Chrome on iOS.

https://techjury.net/blog/web-browser-market-share/

In general yes, but web push is kind of the exception there because this API needs OS level support to wake up apps. Switching to a blink based browser would not help with that.

Why not? If you run Chrome (or Firefox) on iOS, can't the app ask for notification access using the normal OS API? It will then "lend" this functionality to websites, so that when they have an update you'll get a notification from Chrome saying "Website X: Hello world".

That'd require a whole other push system operating on top of the normal iOS push system. Web app users would have to go through some Google-hosted push clearinghouse that wrapped some new format within the existing Apple push protocol, and it'd only work for Chrome.

[EDIT] Web app developers, that is—users of the push system. And it means when end users have 20 sites sending them pushes that they don't want, they'd have to figure out how to disable them in Chrome's settings, rather than their normal system push settings. It'd be a total mess.

Isn't this literally how it's done with every browser on earth? I'm using Linux. Websites don't use DBus and notify-send, they use native Web APIs to talk with the browser. The browser then uses the OS notifications API to translate them, and yes, it manages all the subscriptions too.

Are you talking about Apples walled garden app store or are you talking about the Aplpe-enforced webkit browser monopoly in iOS?

Or are they Effectively dependant on each other?

> should be just freely accessible via the web

Yes this is a significant hammer blow against native apps on iOS, but I don't think this would reduce cost for the consumer. I might be misunderstanding what you mean by "freely accessible" though. Definitely is more convenient for the same web app to be available everywhere.

Freely accessible as in not vetted by Apple. No approval process, no need to pay $100/year, no need to buy a Mac. (Also, gone would be the 30% Apple tax on "in-app" payments.)

No need to maintain multiple versions of applications for different platforms.

Let’s see if they still do want your $100 by requiring it for their Push Notifications API.

You'll need an app-specific cryptographic key to connect to the push service, unless that's changed. And you'll need some system for registering and de-registering push tokens (unless that's also changed).

> Yes this is a significant hammer blow against native apps on iOS

Funny how this significant blow never happened on the world's most dominant OS where all the restrictions that HN loves to whine about don't exist.

Meta's PWA announcement was pretty shocking: they are going to take a 30% cut from PWAs and require they go through their Quest store.

> because we can't just use the web browser already installed

True on Mac, not on iOS. Apple doesn't let you ship custom web renderers. You need to use the system's built-in one. This applies to browsers such as Chrome and Firefox too!

I believe they are goi g to allow custom engines going forward.

Source: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/02/07/mozilla-developing-non-...

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