Did Apple Just Break Web Apps in iOS 17.4 Beta (EU)? – Open Web Advocacy | Hacker News Reader

Did Apple Just Break Web Apps in iOS 17.4 Beta (EU)? – Open Web Advocacy

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Probably because they don’t have a way to replace the built in web view with one from another browser (yet)? So they are now bookmarks that open in the user’s default browser, which may not be WebKit backed (complying with the law).

Smells like a bug, or something they had to rush out the door (although I’d bet wholesale replacing the default engine for web views would break stuff)

They've had 2 years since the final text of the DMA was written. From memory I think we saw it in Feb/Mar 2022.

In the text of the DMA it says "When gatekeepers operate and impose web browser engines, they are in a position to determine the functionality and standards that will apply not only to their own web browsers, but also to competing web browsers and, in turn, to web software applications" which was written to show the intention of the browser engine change was to facilitate web apps.

It’s a beta. If you find a bug in a beta, report it.

It could just be a bug. You don’t need a thinkpiece. And you don’t need to panic.

But panic gets clicks?

The speculation about how this slipped through the door is where I stopped reading. If this was released? Sure. Let’s speculate.

But I swear people forget what a beta is.

A public beta does not and should not allow major breaking changes like this. Would you be satisfied as a manager or PM if this was released to the public under your watch? You’d be fired if this wasn’t an intentional change. If it’s not patched immediately then it’s a good assumption that this is an intentional change.

> Would you be satisfied as a manager or PM if this was released to the public under your watch?

Yes.

You are overreacting. This is what beta software is for. Nobody is getting fired for a bug in a beta release.

It’s NOT a public beta. It’s a developer beta.

But either way your standard is betas should be bug free? Then why bother with betas at all.

My bad didn’t realize it wasn’t public.

I don’t expect betas to be bug free btw, but I do think a beta shouldn’t have such an obvious bug. This should’ve been caught before shipping the beta

Yes, beta software should be expected to be full of bugs and breaks. I know I'm going to sound like an old man ranting at clouds here, but I really do blame Google for this. Before Google release GMail "Beta" (which it was in for 5 years https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/after-five-y...) beta releases of software were widely understood to be very likely to be barely functional and full of many obvious bugs. The public beta release of OS X (the original beta release) was so slow and incomplete in so many ways that it was impossible to use as a primary OS, even if you discounted that it needed OS 9 and Carbon to provide a good chunk of your apps.

But Google dropped gmail "beta" on the world and then proceeded to release multiple other pieces of software all labeled "beta" and it seemed like suddenly "beta" just meant "software that might have updates that change things". Or even worse as more and more companies started releasing their own software under the "beta" label, it seemed to also take on a definition of "software that we want to release, but we don't want to claim is actually finished so that you can't give us crap if it doesn't have features / work the way you want". It got so bad that for a while it looked like "alpha" was going to become the new "beta" and some companies started doing public/developer "alpha" releases.

For Gmail, the general end user experience was polished enough (and realistically the web as a whole was buggy enough) that beta lost any sense of "warning here be dragons" and now we get these sorts of breathless panic articles every handful of years when bugs show up in developer betas for various pieces of software. Beta == very likely broken in some way, it always has and I'd really like to reverse this trend of thinking it doesn't.

The beta doesn't have bugs that affect every single native app, and no iOS beta before has had such a bug. This bug breaks every single PWA, and several iOS betas (and even production releases) have had such bugs. As the article points out, Apple could have implemented automated testing to catch such bugs, but its incentives have resulted in this not happening.

You don’t know they didn’t catch it. You don’t know they haven’t fixed it. Perhaps the fix just didn’t make that build, but pushing it out let them test/get feedback on other things.

Regressions happen, they get fixed. A regression in a beta, especially in an areas that’s being heavily modified since they’re adding read 3rd party support, is not an indication of a scam.

It’s just a bug.

So you just ignore the part where the article says this is a repeated issue and has never happened for native apps? The article has a point, and in order to pooh-pooh it, you ignore it entirely.

Yours is a recipe for more bugs getting in past beta and more people wasting time reporting

Reporting bugs will cause more to get past the beta?

No, relying on the black hole of bug reporting mechanisms INSTEAD of articles will.

This is one more reason to allow alternative web browsers everywhere.

Wow, hyperbole much? How many people actually affected in any serious way by this?

It makes PWAs an even worse idea, since they won’t work on one of the duopoly platforms in the EU (a market of 450 million) at all

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