Apple claims to have three distinct web browsers in the EU complaint | Hacker News Reader

Apple claims to have three distinct web browsers in the EU complaint

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60 pointsmiohtama44 comments

If you asked me (in the software field, but never working at Apple), I’d 100% agree that Safari on iOS and macOS are two different products.

I would not make the same conclusion about iOS and iPadOS versions.

Why do you say iOS and macOS are different?

My experience as a daily user of both is that a touch-driven browser running on a battery and CPU limited device with a small screen where that engine is the only approved engine in the platform feels substantially different as a product than a mouse-driven one on a far less constrained system and where other browser engines are explicitly permitted.

I can’t say the extent to which there’s source-level sharing, but from a product angle, I think of them as a different product, same as I think of Outlook Web Access/O365 as different from the fat-client Outlook mail client or Word being a different product from Excel even though they’re commonly sold in a bundle.

(I’m not claiming to be definitively correct here, just admitting that I agree in one key area with Apple’s argument.)

Personally, it comes down to the input method. The entire UI is different because the input method demands it. The version of Safari on Vision Pro will be different too. But the iPhone and iPad versions are practically the same.

Of course whether macOS and iOS Safari are different enough to qualify as separate things depends entirely on context. I don't know the context here, but it seems unlikely that Apple's argument makes sense.

Other than sharing a rendering engine (which itself behaves very differently based on the target OS) they're clearly very different pieces of software.

Arguably Chrome and Edge are significantly more similar.

I'd go further and say that iOS safari and Webview iOS Safari are different browsers. They have fundamentally different features, standards support, etc. Unfortunately the latter is arguably one of the most popular browsers in the US, because every app doesn't want you to leave, no matter where you're going.

They can't let you leave or they wouldn't be able to see where you're going.

And then Apple wouldn't be able to make 30% off you where you're going which is why the app store reviewers encourage devs to use in app browser instead of letting it just load Safari which is a far better experience

Having just hit a super weird bug at work concerning browser focus which only appears on Mac Safari and iOS Safari I'm inclined to disagree -- they're different flavours of the same offering imo.

Nobody is disputing that Safari for iOS and Safari for macOS both use the same open source WebKit rendering engine, so you'd expect many bugs to be common among them. I'm sure many Chrome bugs are shared with Edge and Brave, too.

Chromium and Chrome too, and Chrome Canary. They are all Chrome tho.

For all intents and purposes these browsers are not competing for market share amongst themselves.

Two questions:

1. Does Chrome on iOS represent valid competition for Safari? Why/why not?

2. Does Edge on Windows represent valid competition for Chrome? Why/why not?

1.Would you care to reply first? How does a company compete with itself?

2.Do you think it's honest to compare two browsers from different companies from two versions of a browser of the same company?

1. I never said they do. It's possible in theory, it depends on context. There's no simple absolute answer to this hypothetical.

2. I never proposed such a comparison. It could be honest or not honest depending on context. There's no simple absolute answer to this hypothetical.

Now that I've answered your questions, I'm curious to hear your answers to the questions I asked of aaomidi. Fortunately my questions weren't abstract or hypothetical so should be a lot easier to answer.

1. Yes, and Firefox

2. Yes, Microsoft has enough weight to counterbalance Google if they want. Doesn't mean it will be to favor the consumers as they all collude and avoid conflict.

I disagree for #1, since the browsers on iOS and iPadOS are a skin for Safari.

Those browsers import the WebKit web view for rendering pages, not “Safari.” They are completely independent web browsers in every respect other than rendering engine. They manage their own cookies, bookmarks, history, UX, cloud MMO sync, etc.

If your concern is an entity having control of web standards, then you will agree that web browsers based on Blink or Chromium don’t represent competition for Google Chrome.

Personally, my concern is maximising rendering engine diversity, and iOS represents the last stand against Chrome’s total dominance. If you don’t like WebKit, don’t buy an iPhone. And to anyone who does web development, stop bitching and moaning that you have to support another web browser. The web is supposed to be an open platform, not the Google Chrome platform.

They also claim to have three app stores so their tablets aren't subject to the DMA, because they haven't been able to sell enough products to hit the 45M mark on some of their range.

Just Apple doing Apple things. I'm sure it's all just a distraction to give them more time before they have to comply.

It is a shame, as the iPad could become a much better product with a little more openness.

Even if they let you run the MacOS " finder/quartz shell" only when keyboard and mouse is connected and restricted to the App store, it would be a big improvement

IMO the biggest example of this is multiple users. Why can’t the iPad use multiple logins? Well, actually, it can… if you’re a school. But the rest of us are locked out of that functionality.

Why? Better product for whom? I want to agree with you but I think the market has spoken for the majority. We are just the minority and I have made peace with this fact.

More content creation, programming, etc. The iPad won the tablet wars, but it is still a small niche product compared to PCs.

Note how Apple is trying to claim their iPad customer base in EU is relatively small (< 45M) to avoid being regulated.

But I think you didn’t answer my question. How exactly to make it a better product? What is a better product? There are tablets that can do those kinds of work better, but is it a better product?

As an end user, we definitely would be think of “best product for me”, a population of size 1. And even if we expand that to include “people like me”, often the population is still very small. I really wish there’s a market to make things best for this smaller bubble of population around me, but for the product to exist and thriving it has to be commercially successful. Also the smaller the volume the more expensive it is. (Eg like the VR computer that runs Linux which is still in development, that thing is in a price range that many people would have want one don’t think it’s worth that amount of money.)

There’s a lot of complaints on how dumb the iPad is since day 1, but no one has convinced me yet their vision is indeed better than Apple’s (which not only includes features sets, form factor, UX, etc but also how the mass market would adopts that and make the whole ecosystem thriving.)

> How exactly to make it a better product? What is a better product?

I meant a better product for programmers. There are lots of discussions on HN about this topic, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36530607.

In short, it would be great to be able to code locally with less limitations. Surface Go et al. are pretty good for this purpose. The iPad isn't.

I realize it is a niche market. Or maybe not? Lot's of K-12 students use iPads.

Right, that’s what I understood and I have been trying to achieve that for years. I have made my peace to buy and bring both. But if I have to pick one most of the time I’d pick the MacBook Pro.

My point above is addressing this kind of needs. As a programmer one would of course think that having that extra capability would be a strictly more capable device. But that kind of thinking is missing the big picture. The limitation Apple put in place enforces a certain level of quality, and also the direction developers are working towards, etc. I.e. to maximize the expected value of the utility function over the whole population, the expected value over a subset of the population can be lower, and in this case is lower. And I can’t blame Apple to choose the mass than me (and the small bubble around me). That’s what I’d do too if I want to make a great product that people love (note that if “I want to make a great product that programmers love”, then the optimization would be different.

They are separate things. If the EU meant to regulate based on brands or feels, they would have written the law as such.

The regulatory commission ended up ruling that it's all just one app store (for the purposes of the App Store service itself) and opened a market investigation (for iOS/iPadOS distinction). I wouldn't say it's decided they're "separate things" just yet.

Sorry, what's the context here?

There are situations where they absolutely count as three different pieces of software, and there are contexts where it makes no sense at all to distinguish them.

But a random tweet with zero context... I don't have the slightest idea what this is about.

DMA defines core platform services (CPS) as a unit of antitrust regulation. Apple tried to split Safari and App store into multiple different CPS so user counts of some of those products won't exceed the regulation threshold (45M).

[dupe]

More discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38123216

Hilarious that Apple thought this would work.

Just check the amount of people in this thread that stopped by to say they believe it

How rude to leave out the Apple Watch (emails can render a web view, which is the only way to log onto captive portals)!

You can open any link from a conversation on Apple Watch and navigate the website, so the browser is its actually much more browsery

Wow, even more browsers! Healthy competition is a beautiful thing.

As a user, I’d have thought Mac safari and iOS/ipad safari are different browsers, BUT all are using the same WebKit.

And iOS/ipad is more integrated than Mac OS as I cannot change the browser engine grr.

Wait. Besides browser, how about sideloading app? I thought we should see something when iOS 17 released, but there is nothing, isn't there? There are only 4 months left.

I wouldn't be surprised if they release an iOS update on the exact day they need to comply.

And will definitely restrict it to EU and make it hard to claim that you are from EU if you are not.

They said it because the EU complaint was so incompetently written it doesn't address the distinction of browser and engine.

Your honor, what you see as "Chrome" is actually 2^x distinct browsers, with x being the number of A/B test groups currently deployed. Each distinct combination of features represent a distinct product experience and thus a distinct product.

We therefore submit that the HHI of the browser market is actually <10, which economists say represent a near-perfect competitive market.

Times the number of OSes it is built for.

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