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Comment by w4 | Hacker News Reader

I’m primed to be upset with Apple these days, but this doesn’t seem like an unreasonable position. The EU is forcing them to do a bunch of work to support alternate browser engines, this in turn creates a bunch of additional work if Apple wants to fully support PWAs, and PWAs aren’t really in Apple’s financial interest to begin with, so f-it. They're not going to spend resources to add support for PWAs in the EU. It's easier to just disable them and call it a day.

It's a rational choice. Apple isn’t a charity, so why would they spend resources on extra work that they didn’t want to do in the first place, given that work is not required for legal compliance. The security spin is clearly nonsense, but other than that I can't really fault Apple for their position on this, even if I wish it were different.

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>PWAs aren’t really in Apple’s financial interest to begin with, so f-it

Translation: Apple hates developers who believe in open tech, despite being built on mountains of foundational open tech, like every other company.

The EU is not forcing Apple to do any work. Apple is choosing to do the work mostly to make competing browsers as limited and non-compelling as possible, while still hoping to stay within the letter of the law. They could in reality comply pretty much by removing their arbitrary restrictions.

> It's a rational choice. Apple isn’t a charity, so why would they spend resources on extra work that they didn’t want to do in the first place, given that work is not required for legal compliance.

I mean, the obvious answer would be that it actually is required. And the outcome of that would be that Apple gets a bunch of bad press, pays a ton in fines, and ends up with a consent decree that restricts them more than just acting in good faith would have.

It feels like a really stupid gamble. There's so little to gain from it, in comparison to the cost if the gamble fails. Apple owns their users, lock, stock and barrel. Basically none of them is going to switch to a competing app store or browser even once those exist. And when the users don't move, neither will the developers.

Telling a company they must implement an API is absolutely telling them to do work. And you're well within the right to refuse entirely.

Well we tell railroad operators how to do their job every day so that multiple companies running the actual trains can coexist and compete. Or even better, we own them publicly. I don't really see a problem in that, do you?

Since smartphones are new railroads, they should be treated as a platform on that the actual innovation happens. They should be robust (so that users can rely on them), neutral (concentrate on their own layer in the stack), adhere to standards (for cross border cooperation) and provide as little friction to competition on top of them as possible.

Except they haven't told Apple to implement any APIs. They've told Apple to stop abusing their dominant market position and allow competing browser engines. Apple needs to do basically nothing to enable that, except to allow the same entitlements they already give Safari for other browsers, and to stop rejecting competing browsers in their policy and review.

(If you disagree, can you name one of the APIs you think the EC has told Apple to implement? Or name the APIs Apple was forced to implement to allow, because allowing competing browser engines would not have been at all possible without them?)

But that'd actually allow competition, and Apple seems to be very insecure about their ability to compete on a level playing field. I don't really understand why. Those 600 new APIs? They're 600 new restrictions.

I wouldn't say that Apple is well within their rights to break the law, and it's surprising to me that anyone would say so. But if they don't want to follow the laws, they are well within their rights to leave the market. (Now, there's of course no chance that Apple leaves the EU. After all, they still continue to operate in China and cooperating with the Chinese authorities, because they make a lot of money there.)

Taking PWAs away is not "preventing other browser engines" on iOS. Apple is clearly in compliance with the law

So I take it you agree they have not been told to implement any APIs, and retract your original claim?

We'll see how the EC reacts to what Apple did with PWAs. The DMA is not a checklist of specific features. It doesn't talk about PWAs, just like it doesn't talk about specific APIs. It's basically just very broad requirements for the big platforms to open up for competition.

By killing PWAs, Apple is preventing competition on both areas where they have DMA mandates, iPhone apps and browsers. (Yes, you can make a browser, but better support for PWAs would have been one of the easier selling points for competing browsers. By artificially disallowing them, Apple is removing that feature from play.)

Now Apple is pretending that their choices were to do a ton of work, or to cripple PWAs as both an app store competitor and as a feature of browser differentiation, and oh golly they just had to do the latter. But in reality they had the third choice of just opening up the platform, which is pretty much what the regulations tried to achieve. That they chose to do extra work to cripple the competition rather than open up seems like the kind of things regulators won't be happy about.

> It's a rational choice.

Yes, I agree here. To me, this feels like the cookie legislation all over again, in the sense that the end result was a lot of annoying cookie banners instead of websites stopping the usage of cookies. And yes, I know that answering 'no' in these banners reduces the amount of cookies used, but I am seeing more and more websites where things like videos don't work unless you accept cookies.

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