The reasoning here from Apple seems reasonable to me to be honest - they’ve gone into a surprising level of technical detail, quite interesting. I suspect many in this thread are commenting without actually reading their argument.
"including isolation of storage and enforcement of system prompts to access privacy impacting capabilities on a per-site basis"
One scenario is that today there is one instance of WebKit owned by the Home Screen process shared amongst all of the PWA apps which is enforcing that prompt. With third party engines that prompt would appear for the first app invocation but not any subsequent ones.
This is only an issue with PWA since for normal apps the browser process is per-app rather than shared.
Now they could rewrite the Home Screen execution environment to support one engine per app but their argument is that it's not worth their effort.
Apple surely does this on purpose to prevent PWAs from being useful. Can't let any App store competition arise.
Allowing PWA to access the camera/microphone without system prompts and install other apps on the device is a little more than just annoying.
Objective-C allows dynamic dispatch to private API methods which would be just fine to do on third party app stores.
As I mentioned above the issue is likely related to engines being able to cache the system prompts approvals across multiple PWAs effectively bypassing them.
On macOS, I already have to both grant Firefox permission to access camera, and then Firefox asks me about every website trying to access it individually, using their own UI.
Or to companies like Google and Meta for advertising purposes.
This isn't any different from how it works already for all kinds of apps: If you grant Zoom the permission to access your camera, you do that once, and have to trust it on a per-call basis to not turn on your camera without your explicit consent.
If you don't trust your third-party browser to respect your choice as to which websites you want to grant access to your sensitive data, you probably shouldn't be using it, or at least not grant it access to that data in turn.
And you may be happy changing the status quo to allow that but I think it is a terrifying proposition.
The same applies to photos. iOS even has an API to let you pick a single photo to upload/share with an app that doesn't grant any access beyond that. And for messages there isn't even an API in the iOS sandbox.
Maybe you could clarify your concern; as far as I understand it, nothing whatsoever is changing on iOS due to the DMA in this regard (and I wouldn't want it to).
For example Apple has `UIWebView` and `JavaScriptCore`. They could have abstracted the implementation so PWA's run in like a `UIHomeScreenWebAppView` which requires a protocol `IWebView` and `IJavaScriptEngine`.
Implementations could delegate OS integration tasks back to the operating system. For example notifications.
The technical approach and legwork is already done with React Native.
I can appreciate that Apple has put in a lot of thought into this but it seems like they are not following the spirit of the DMA laws. And I can understand why.
iPhone costs ~$1000, with the highest profit margins on hardware plus AppStore out of any phone maker = for free lol.
Is this astroturfing HN loves to provide Apple for free? Apple fans will go out of their way to white knightly defend a trillion dollar company who can easily afford do implement any regulatory challenge, gaslighting you for having the audacity to hold Apple accountable to a high standards, as if they're some broke 3 person start-up scraping behind the couch cushions for money, when Apple is absolutely minted with the GDP of an entire country.
iOS updates used to be paid in the past (due to Sarbanes-Oxley in the US)!
(Unless you downloaded the update file from Apple's CDN directly and manually updated your iPod Touch via iTunes, not that I ever did that as that would be very naughty ;-))
Because otherwise your comment is just another "hail Apple, fuck their critics for hating my favorite company".
And I don’t get why people who don’t like the Apple way care so much. There’s an alternative that’s more open. Go build your utopia there, if the lack of barriers makes it so easy.
A counter to this would be game store sites like Steam have in 30% fees but steam doesn't have a monopoly on the games store. Apple has a monopoly on the app store.
Apple has been taking a lot of actions within the last year against the developer community: 1) Retaliations in the anti-competitive lawsuits against Apple in US (surrounding fees) : * You must request an entitlement now from apple to link to an external payment provider in app. You must still give apple a 27% even if you use external payments. * If Apple feels a lack of compliance with the entitlement program they have the right to look through financial books and bill for if they think their cut was missed.
2) Retaliations in the anti-competitive lawsuits against Apple in EU (surrounding fees) : * PWAs. PWAs were starting to become a form of protest for developer to get around Apple's closed source system. PWAs don't utilize Apple's SDKs. Sure Apple may have some points surrounding the technical inefficiencies surrounding PWAs but it is suspicious that these rules have taken place during these lawsuits.
3) Beeper * Everything going on with Beeper enforces the point that Apples wants to have a stranglehold on their monopoly
Optional 4) The insane markup of the Vision Pro relative to competitors. Making it difficult for devs to test new products.
All of these exemplify Apple's use of their monopoly on the individuals who support their ecosystem (developers). There is strong consumer demand for Apple so their is a strong incentive to develop with Apple. Being an early-stage founder myself I am finding it very difficult to convince myself that developing on Apple for proving product market fit is the way to go.
These rules are hurting the smaller developer teams who can't afford to pay these fees and can't pay for a compliance guy in the beginning to look over Apple specific polices. PWAs being canceled is just another example of Apple over-using their power to hurt the little guy.
New features had to be paid for due to accounting requirements.