Senators reintroduce App Store bill to rein in 'gatekeeper power'
9to5mac.com
9to5mac.com
But modern society depends on using Apps on Smartphone. Even people might disagree we are at this stage I dont think anyone would disagree it is the trajectory we are heading. The web simply dont offer the same experience and is not an alternative for argument sake. App Store held so much power that Apple should have relinquish its control long ago. At least by 2020.
Yet without Steve Jobs, Apple has been left on Autopilot to do what they were doing since Steve Jobs left. Steve Jobs often spoke about the importance of intuition, referring to it as a powerful force that can guide decision-making and innovation, sometimes even more so than intellect. And right now Apple has plenty of intellect, practically zero intuition.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Why is my bank’s website close to utterly unusable in a mobile browser (crazy timeouts, popups everywhere, etc) but their app is super smooth? You can argue about the root cause of the issue, but it’s fundamentally not a technology problem.
Yeah, we both know the answer is lock-in... but maybe that's a sign that the gnomes and gnome-adjacent need to be tard-wrangled for the good of society?
There were several generic apps that allowed you to add any of your banks and pull transactions, setup transfers, and all other basic things you can do with a bank account.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FinTS
Then, banks discovered that they can lock their customers in an own app where they don’t hear about other banks. And also, where their developers don’t need to read and understand (and implement) the HBCI/FinTS standard.
The entire reason this is the case is because Apple and Google have intentionally prevented the web from offering the same experience. They've limited the APIs that web apps have access to and made them clumsy to use and "install". Web apps could easily compete with native, but that would limit their control over the app market and revenue.
But we’re talking about extremely basic things. Simple pages that display data, like a bank website showing my transactions. And you know what? The simplest of sites seem to work awful on the web… because the web developers make bad sites. I have seen examples of sites that are smooth, functional, and beautiful. But most sites are not. They are bloated messes where the user experience seems to be 15th on the list of concerns.
To answer to the question: “why does the web suck on mobile” is almost entirely “because web developers make awful websites”.
PWA's can do background sync, there's push notifications, badge icons, the kinds of things that allow websites to feel more like apps — on Android and not iOS.
The AJAX approach was pioneered by the Outlook web team ~1998 and semi-standardized as XMLHTTP in IE 5 (1999).
So a decade before Chrome was released.
Admittedly, Chrome did a lot to push forward web apps, but that was 100% in Google's self-interest given they were competing against thick client MS Office.
For many things there's might be a basic API available, but when you dig a little deeper you find huge limitations. Geolocation is a great example of that. Sure, it's available. But you couldn't implement a navigation app, for example. Because you can't watch the location and get updates in the background. Not to mention that accuracy and update frequency can be severely reduced in a PWA vs a native app.
Other limited APIs include things like bluetooth, audio, NFC, notifications, file system access, sensors (proximity, light, etc), camera functionality.
Safari (and therefore Apple) doesn't support things like accelerometer/gyroscope access, battery status, vibration, network info.
You can't access things like the user's contacts or calendar. And we could argue over whether limiting access to stuff like this is a good or bad thing. But the fact is that this stuff is available in various ways to native apps, but not at all to web apps.
But our phones are more powerful than the computers that landed us on the moon and are packed full of sensors and connectivity. The web is incapable of matching a native app, if it is actually doing something interesting.
It also won't display the weather for the next few hours and your calendar on the same screen whenever you open up your phone without being an extremely bothersome action every time.
I wouldn't claim to have better general intuition about consumer preferences than Steve Jobs, but I called this one right: when the iPhone launched without third-party apps, I thought that was a crazy decision that wouldn't last once the competition started to catch up.
There are ways of squaring the circle. There are user experiences that can make even the dumbest user understand that they are taking the security of their device into their own hands.
Once they understand that, it isn’t up to Apple to decide for them that the iPhone that the user purchased must remain secure. Users must be permitted to make potentially dangerous choices with their own hardware if they so choose.
Mac users can disable system integrity protection and modify the OS or run unsigned apps (though the hoops to do this get more burdensome each OS release, and unsigned apps can’t use the secure enclave, or modern VPN apis, etc - another scumbag move by Apple) and the sky hasn’t fallen over there, nor in Europe where sideloading on iOS is mandated by law (and Apple implemented).
Louis Rossman was right.
If the hardware is faulty, that sort of thing should show up on an automated test of the drive. In a professional setting, I'd expect this sort of thing to be run unattended: plug it in, turn it on, check back later to see if anything failed.
> a software-triggered problem that doesn’t go away easily
This sounds like re-image the OS territory. A user sophisticated enough to unlock and modify the OS is sophisticated enough to manage their own backups.
Of course they shouldn't wipe/reflash devices needlessly if a hardware problem is obviously the cause.
I'd love to be able to publish TWAs on the app store, there is even web APIs for handling app store payments.
We also need an option to stay on Version N-1 stable version of iOS, during the months when Version N is being fixed in public. Otherwise, iOS devices are only secure about 6 months of the year, between March and September, until the cycle of vulnerability begins anew.
Should go for all code IMO, games included.
It's not possible to reinstall any older version you were previously running.
You will lose access to apps which are not compatible with newer iOS.
Many zero-day security flaws are documented as fixed in Apple updates, actively used to compromise iOS devices.
Ha. Yeah, I bet you are.
2025-04-31, "Judge rules Apple executive lied under oath, makes criminal contempt referral", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43856795
2025-05-02, "Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43867692
2025-06-04, "Court denies Apple appeal in Epic Games case, keeping App Store changes in place", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44186891
"For the reasons set forth herein, the Court FINDS Apple in willful violation of this Court’s 2021 Injunction which issued to restrain and prohibit Apple’s anticompetitive conduct and anticompetitive pricing."
But this stuff is presented in not the most accessible ways. I tried authoring the tweet-length version. It's up to you, whom to trust or not trust on the Internet!