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Comment by bitpush | Hacker News Reader

> The reason I believe the web experience is inferior is because companies put more resources into apps at the expense of the web.

The main reason is just a single company - Apple. They have been hell bent on nerfing Safari so that they can continue their rent seeking behavior on App Store.

If Spotify has a functional mobile website, they cant take 30% cut from their app. The way Apple does is 2 fold. 1) deliberating not investing $$ into Safari 2) claiming that you'll get malware from internet.

Both are hypocritical.

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Yes that’s why there are so many great PWAs on Android and companies don’t make apps for Android and instead tell their users to use the web app…

And Spotify hasn’t had in app purchasing of subscriptions on iOS for over a decade. Apple has never once said you would get malware by using Safari.

Spotify was an example, but since you were harping on it. Why is it that on desktop everyone uses spotify.com to listen to music, purchase subscription but when it comes to iPhone, we have to install an app from the App Store.

Who do you think is stopping from that happening?

Well seeing that you could play music in the background from Safari since 2007, Spotify is the one forcing you to use an app

Apple makes no money from the Spotify app being on the iPhone and hadn’t for over a decade.

This is an untrue statement.

Music was played by the iTunes process on mobile until 2016, and only a single audio stream at a time. How dare you wanted a fade in/out with less than 3 seconds latency!

And even then Apple was reluctant to implement a correct Promise based Audio API in WebKit, which in turn was incompatible with all other Web Browsers (up until today, btw) and also had very different audio formats supported that were only compatible with iOS due to proprietary patents.

Saying WebKit played music in 2007 is literally a worse experience than a Flash web player doing that.

It is very true, you think the only way thst music came from your phone before 2016 was iTunes? It was a hack that streaming services - mostly radio streaming services- used before iOS 4 when apps could play music in the background used because Safari was the only thing that could run in the background.

The question was why did Spotify have to use an app instead of using the web.

But then again, are you really saying that Android users don’t use the app?

> Why is it that on desktop everyone uses spotify.com to listen to music

But … I don’t?

I download and install Spotify.app on my computer (at least my gf does on hers, I use Apple Music). Maybe I am the weird one? No I am not, I skimmed the Spotify subreddit and most use the app on PC/Mac: It has keyboard shortcuts, people find it nicer being its own program instead some browser tab, it is more lightweight, it provides offline play and crossfading and has (freemium and paid) higher bitrate than web. It is you who are missing out.

Google play store is no better

In this discussion, both can be bad faith actors.

It's not a defensive argument about "but he did it too"!

That's not how you get to a better solution to the problem at hand.

On iOS there is no effective way to install sideloaded apps, therefore this rent seeking behavior is even more hostile to the user.

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