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Comment by ivan_gammel | Hacker News Reader

Very questionable argumentation. This can be seen from two different angles:

1. PWA is a native wrapper for a web application, not a browser. It is supposed to be limited to the app website. DMA does not tell Apple that every app with embedded WebView should offer users possibility to switch the engine. Why PWA should be treated differently here? I‘d rather clarify this with regulators first, before harming end users.

2. There’s no browser engines currently supporting PWA on Apple mobile devices. Apple has enough resources and time to figure out how to sandbox PWAs on other engines together with the first browser vendor that decides to offer such support and commit engineering resources to this project. In the meantime current solution could stay simply because it does not hinder any competition.

I’m not a legal expert, so maybe I miss something here. But Apple statement does not look convincing to me.

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> DMA does not tell Apple that every app with embedded WebView should offer users possibility to switch the engine.

I don’t see how that’s related to the issue being discussed.

> In the meantime current solution could stay simply because it does not hinder any competition.

Why do you think “you can install a third party browser, but if you do, you can’t add PWAs to the Home Screen” doesn’t hinder competition?

>I don’t see how that’s related to the issue being discussed.

PWA is not a browser, it is a native app using a browser engine to render a specific website.

>Why do you think “you can install a third party browser, but if you do, you can’t add PWAs to the Home Screen” doesn’t hinder competition?

I literally explained it in my comment you are replying to, but I can repeat. Competition does not exist yet. Browsers do not offer PWA support out of the box, it is a feature to be implemented separately from rendering engine. See Firefox on Windows for an example — it doesn’t support PWA out of the box. This feature has to be built: if Apple were to hinder the competition, they would resist it by not offering the APIs. But they can offer them through the cooperation with vendors, even if those APIs do not exist yet. Say, Mozilla comes and asks for APIs: Apple starts negotiating and proposes the compatibility requirements and a reasonable timeline. They both work on their part and eventually Firefox is released with PWA support. Who would fine or sue them if it worked this way? How the violation of DMA could be proven?

> Why do you think “you can install a third party browser, but if you do, you can’t add PWAs to the Home Screen” doesn’t hinder competition?

Because you can't add PWAs to the Home Screen if you use the first-party browser, either. The whole point of this article is they're turning off PWAs for Safari so that they're all on the same feature footing.

The comment I replied to said “In the meantime current solution could stay”. In context, I can’t interpret “the current solution” else than as what’s in shipping iOS now.

> Why do you think “you can install a third party browser, but if you do, you can’t add PWAs to the Home Screen” doesn’t hinder competition?

Is there any reason that you couldn't just install a third-party browser and add PWAs to the home screen that use WebKit as a rendering engine?

Why would these two different things affect each other?

> In the meantime current solution could stay simply because it does not hinder any competition.

As I understand it, this is specifically not allowed by the DMA, since it would be considered an unfair advantage to Safari, if that browser/engine was the only one allowed to run PWAs.

By the same logic the mere existence of Safari would be unfair because other browsers are not ported yet. This is of course incorrect reading of DMA. Have a look yourself:

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?toc=OJ%3AL%3...

If Apple demonstrates that the entry barrier is sufficiently low by cooperating with other vendors, how one could possibly build a legal case under DMA against them? On the contrary, by disabling PWA in Safari Apple acts as a gate keeper complicating access to the platform for business users. THIS is what DMA forbids.

Also it has to be taken into account that the less PWA engines exist the lower is actually the entry barrier. We only need 2-3 competing solutions max to support innovation without harming PWA developers.

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