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Comment by apazzolini | Hacker News Reader

Getting pretty huge clown face painting meme vibes.

It was mind-blowing to me that in previous threads, Apple fanatics were defending Apple, saying that Epic had broken the developer agreement. It hadn't. Schiller clearly stated that he banned Epic because he didn't believe Sweeney when Sweeney literally said that he would abide by the agreement. I don't see this behavior with any other company.

A childish move, unexpected from such a company like apple especially with timing.

Which probably boils down to one overzealous middle/higher manager trying too hard to be a good boi for superiors to get extra bonus... I don't think it panned as expected. Otherwise apple corporate culture is quite rotten.

There is no way such a decision was not approved by the upper echelon of management. That has both legal ramifications and monetary for a huge client.

> A childish move, unexpected from such a company like apple especially with timing.

Especially when you add the failed PWA move before, they're starting to look pretty bad.

I just like nice computers and don’t really care about the inter-corporate mudslinging.

Now not paying an equal share of tax, on the other hand, is criticism I can join in on.

Serious question, what PWAs are worth using on Android that don't work on iOS?

It's not about whether it's worth using, it's about having the mere option of building an app without the overhead of paying developer fees to Apple.

So it's not about PWAs at all then, it's just a handy complaint?

I don't think we can really know the potential of PWA, since most developers aren't going to put effort into PWAs if they won't work for a big chunk of the market. Apple is effectively strangling the technology on all platforms by refusing to support it on theirs.

If PWAs had any merit at all, why would anyone build a native Android app today where all these magic features are inhibited?

What's actually missing that's stopping this from working?

> What's actually missing that's stopping this from working?

Proper support on all platforms. No point working on PWAs that have janky tooling (reason: see previous sentence) when they're only going to work decently on Android devices anyway.

So why would you build a native Android app if PWAs work better? There’s way more web developers than Android developers, and you would avoid the Play Store fees. Sound cheaper to me. What part of iOS is invalidating the value proposition for Android here?

You also didn’t answer what is missing. What is missing? What’s this insurmountable problem that’s solved everywhere else? Why is janky tooling attributable to Apple?

Try reading my post again, maybe? The tooling is pretty janky because no one does this yet. No point to torture yourself with janky tooling when you only get to target android anyway...

Again, not answering a thing but a making up a claim you aren't willing or able to support. How is this supposed web development tooling jankiness attributable to Apple today? Feature detection is a solved problem. What tooling are you even referring to? You aren't even trying to support this with a concrete claim. This is nonsense and you know it.

PWAs are the perfect scapegoat of infinite nebulous whining. The definition of a progressive web app might as well be "whatever Chrome has but Safari doesn't, no matter what year it is or how those features change, and no matter how terrible of an idea they might be even on Chrome".

> Proper support on all platforms. No point working on PWAs that have janky tooling (reason: see previous sentence) when they're only going to work decently on Android devices anyway.

If you need it spelled out for you:

* WebUSB

* WebBLE

* WebSerial

* WebGL

* Many more standards Apple refuses to implement because it would let developers break free of their walled garden

Without being able to target apple devices why would I, or anyone, bother using these technologies and invest in their tooling? Just make a native android app with quality tooling that's been around for a decade and be done with it.

Right, I wanted you to spell it out because I was expecting you to write that exact sort of nonsense. Your first three examples aren't even web standards they're experimental features in Chrome that not even Firefox supports. The fourth actually is supported by Safari/iOS. What missing standards are stopping you from writing Progressive WEB Apps? Be exact please.

And.... even if you wanted to build a serial-port enabled "Works only in Chrome" PWA today (lol, we both know you're not) there's no tooling jankiness stopping you from doing so, checking for `if ("serial" in navigator) { ... }` requires no tooling at all it's just plain javascript, you'd just choose to show an error message for browsers like Safari and Firefox that don't support it.

I'm not convinced you're even arguing in good faith here. Well, I never was because PWA whiners never are, but you've proven you're not.

The Epic blog post shows emails with Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi. This was all approved by upper management.

Those are the two that seem like pure poison.

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