I think that's a fair assessment based on the bizarre fees and hoops Apple has created under the guise of malicious compliance. There was even a brief moment where they blocked PWAs.
Apple knows what they're doing, they even retroactively added a Free software carveout to the policy in an attempt to offer an olive branch. The longer they spend trying to reinvent the same racket though, the more obvious their market damages become. And if the EU lets them get away with this reconfiguration, they'll let them get away with anything. The US suit ought to bring the hammer down, and threaten Apple with a breakup if they can't find a way to compete with third-parties naturally.
This was lawyers doing stupid shit. FAFO.
I think they’re really annoyed by the Facebooks and Spotify’s of the world that make a fortune from the iPhone and pay nothing.
“We have to open up” + “this is our chance to claw some back” = here’s the core technology fee.
And not the Mac?
It seems pretty obvious that it's not even an ideological thing, Apple is fine with some users not being forced through their ecosystem. They know that the iPhone specifically is most lucrative and are trying to arbitrarily distinguish it from their other products. It frankly doesn't matter how Apple feels about it at the end of the day, there's only compliance and noncompliance.
Also they tried to retrofit the App Store onto the Mac, it’s a joke compared to what they seem to have thought it would become. Yeah there is software, and I use it, but for many reasons it’s far less successful than it should have been if done well.
> It frankly doesn't matter how Apple feels about it at the end of the day, there's only compliance and noncompliance.
I agree. Some people see the CTF and can’t imagine why they’d create it. I’m just trying to explain what I (and others) have suggested was the reason. It makes sense and is just given their seeming point of view.
Problem for them is no one else, even huge fans, seems to agree.
Which isn't to say that Apple isn't playing malicious compliance hard, the entire CTF thing is ridiculous and demonstrates how desperately they do abuse the claim of security when it is actually all about profit... but the PWA thing isn't really part of that.
These security excuses are bullshit and that does include PWAs.
At any rate, it's not clear to me that granting hardware permissions when you install a PWA is any better than letting the user choose what permissions to grant when you first visit a page. If that really is how it works, maybe alternate browsers will be able to improve over Safari's permission model too.
> it's not clear to me
So, you may not have watched normal users operate a web browser. But... they click on everything in their way. This is why, for example, most "malware" calls I get are just dozens upon dozens of Notifications API permissions being granted in Chrome to random websites. The best way to fix this is... just destroy the Notifications API as a thing, it's a terrible idea. But the next best way is to ensure access to it is limited to contexts where it's obvious a user is interested in persistent communication with a given site or app. Like installing it.
At any point where you thought "just asking the user when they first visit the page for permission" was an adequate concept, you were wrong. And most malicious websites abuse this wrongness ad-nauseum, to the point that browsers now include ways to block websites from making repetitive requests as a attempt to fix it without fixing it.
Firefox has a pretty good record, and I consider their standards positions (https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/) the gold standard. iOS/Safari moves a little more slowly, but generally aligns with good practice.
Google and Microsoft are the two companies everyone else (including Safari) is significantly improving over by actually paying attention to how real users interact with the Internet.
For the clueless user, nothing has changed other than which button they obediently push. For the savvy user, you've added an arbitrary special case and a hoop to jump through to get the functionality you wanted in the first place. Neither case is improved in the end.