Apple on course to break all Web Apps in EU within 20 days
open-web-advocacy.org
open-web-advocacy.org
And yet many are praising a locked down environment, even if the implications are obvious. Especially for the craft of software development, where I find such a position especially ironic.
Rest have probably some long held stocks or some obscure blind patriotism (which patriotism isn't blind). If you look for objectivity on Apple, this forum is as far as one can get on a web not containing the fruit name in its URL.
The web, by its very nature, is the ultimate app store and Apple's largest potential competitor, highlighting the anti-competitive concerns.
However, "website install" implies heightened risk and potential device alteration, needlessly creating confusion and suspicion. This erodes the inherent simplicity of web apps and undermines long-established trust in safe web browsing within a controlled tab, ultimately hindering user adoption.
Preserving trust in the web means emphasizing that web apps are inherently enhanced websites, thereby leveraging the existing trust users place in the web. Instead of install we should call it "switching to standalone". It also goes with OS integration and launchers like an app button on mobile and users with associate these things with standalone.
The browser engine is an execution environment: web apps inherently operate within the secure sandbox of the browser, potentially even enhancing security as they are isolated from deep system elements.
Regulations like the DMA are precisely concerned with ensuring users have meaningful choice between platforms and distribution models. Web apps and alternative browsers are integral in that shift.
Inflated security fears of the web platform have long been used to undermine user choice and promote closed systems. This needs to change!
Apple maintaining WebKit as a security-focused choice while empowering alternative engines allows them to retain control while simultaneously enabling those who desire more open web technologies.
Under Steve Jobs, Apple championed superior web technologies with the introduction of Safari and WebKit. This early spirit focused on excellence that naturally attracted users. Recent strategies, sadly, shift towards leveraging monopolistic advantages rather than leading through pure innovation.
It's alarming that legal and regulatory pressure is needed to foster a fundamental debate about open software and user choice.
The change: PWAs installed to the home screen will no longer open as individual apps, but as web apps in the browser.
Most web apps are already only used in the browser, so almost all web apps will continue to work the same as before.
What will break: functionality conditional upon installing to the home screen. The big one is push notifications.
What won’t break: almost every web app will continue to work the same as before. Everything that currently works when opened in Safari will continue to work like that.
Open Web Advocacy really really want people to equate the functionality specific to PWAs installed to the home screen with all web apps. This is not true.
It’s perfectly fine to be angry with Apple for this change. It’s perfectly fine to demand change. What is not fine is telling outright lies like “Apple will break all web apps”. This is not even remotely close to being true and they know this. It’s an intentional lie to get people angry.
The majority of the article discusses the home screen issue specifically.
Regardless, as someone who builds PWAs in Europe specifically for iOS this is extremely disappointing. It’s a cynical move by Apple and I appreciate this site raising the point as I didn’t see it mentioned anywhere.
Apples move here is a very clear attempt to break UX via affecting UI in a negative fashion, and also takes away a key function that is to be expected of some apps (push notifications). This is very obviously and rather transparently a move to preserve their income stream via the walled garden that is the app store.
This move additionally hurts developers. Developing a PWA is far simpler from a multi platform perspective since you're effectively building a responsive full screen website, and instead if you wish to preserve the full screen experience of your users on Apple devices you will.now need to pursue something which compiles to native code - meaning not your PWA. You've at least doubled your overhead development costs in most circumstances.
PWAs recreate a modality that offers less. I would rather have the affordances of a user ahent available.
As a user, I wish my user agent would let me un-standalone PWAs & bring them back to the web. Especially as we start to create permissions like Direct Sockets which are gated on PWAs.
Citation needed for this assertion that almost all web apps are not installed, merely used in browser.
I said most web apps are used in web browsers. I said almost all web apps will continue to work. It looks like you mixed up the first claim with the second.
There are three types of web app to consider:
1. Web apps that aren’t PWAs, that are just used in the browser. These are the norm. These will continue to work unaffected because they were never installed to the home screen anyway. No change in behaviour at all.
2. PWAs that support being installed or being used in a web browser. Among PWAs, these are also the norm. You don’t know whether a new user has installed your app or not, and you want it to work regardless, so that’s how you code it. These will also continue to work, because they already work in Safari, so being opened in Safari isn’t going to break them. Some graceful degradation may occur, depending upon the web app in question. For instance, a web app might optionally support push notifications when installed, but still work without push notifications when used in a web browser.
3. PWAs that only work when they are installed but not when they are used in a web browser. These are a minority, even amongst PWAs. The change will break these.
When I say most web apps are used in web browsers, I am referring to 1. When I say almost all web apps will continue to work, I am referring to 1+2.
The article uses “all web apps” to refer to 3. This is the dishonesty. “Web apps” are 1 + 2 + 3, not the extreme minority of 3 alone. Apple aren’t “breaking all web apps”, Apple are specifically breaking what I describe in 3.
I’ve raised this with OWA before, and they said that their target audience are regulators who would get confused otherwise. I don’t think this is truthful. I think they are sacrificing honesty in order to be more inflammatory.
Readers are not confused, and I don’t think you are. A distraction to try and defend Apple?
1. The only web apps that can possibly be affected at all by this change are ones that are installed to the home screen and used in that way.
2. It is not possible for web apps that are currently used in a browser to be affected by this change.
I don’t think you can disagree with these two statements can you? So how can you make the claim that Apple are going to break all web apps?
Or are you explicitly denying that a “web app” is something you can use in a web browser, and you define it only as something that must be installed to the home screen to work?
Untrue. Also affected are ones that /may/ be installed that way.
> 2. It is not possible for web apps that are currently used in a browser to be affected by this change.
Untrue. Such apps that /may/ be used outside browser are affected.
Done. It says "so".
"Most web apps are already only used in the browser, so almost all web apps will continue to work the same as before."
> There were two claims here: I said most web apps are used in web browsers. I said almost all web apps will continue to work.
You've dropped the word "so".
> When I say most web apps are used in web browsers, I am referring to 1. When I say almost all web apps will continue to work, I am referring to 1+2.
Thanks for that amendment.
> “Web apps” are 1 + 2 + 3, not the extreme minority of 3 alone.
Citation needed for "extreme minority".
imagining all my native apps to loose their login and local settings is beyond acceptable.
I hope this is one of those lies in the article that you’re talking about.
But that's the whole point of a PWA that you install to the home screen.
Not all PWAs are web apps.
Saying "Apple is going to break all web apps" is clickbaity and will only harm this initiative.
I will add that PWAs have been a failure for end users. Almost nobody installs web apps in the home screen.
My phone runs Android and I never install web apps on the home screen or want notifications or push notifications from a web app on my phone. For a time I used Twitter's PWA but they simply didn't pay much attention to it and ended up switching to the native app.
PWAs in principle are great and had great potential but Apple succeeded in killing those by not providing first-class support on iOS and iPadOS. Nobody is going to invest in a web app if it can't run on an iPhone.
the biggest alternative store is the web
the website you use today can be a functional "app" tomorrow if well written, without "install"
"install" is not even needed, the thing that happens when "installing a website" is just a switch to standalone mode from tab view (and get a direct launch button etc.)
by web apps (standalone websites) the browser stays as the running environment on top of OS, the web security model and trust stays intact
competition law will demolish anything with time that hinders web apps since in its core it is about enabling alternative distribution platforms (app stores)...
users can always choose to stay by safari and not opt in to other browser engines if they fear them... sometimes apple and others talk about like if a device gets compromised by a web app run by firefox on ios then a virus creeps in to the apple cloud and destroys all apple devices...
heck no, it can be even MORE secure, safari can be safe, apple can publish webkit safari for security conscious people and chromium safari for bolder ones, there might be a new netscape navigator that never runs javascript as a security model... free to choose!
it is sad we have to fight for this to happen
I think under steve jobs apple would have the best web browser beating chrome and they would have converted app store monopoly revenue to other sources of revenue based on excellence, not monopoly