Me as engineer: it's wild a big corporation dictates a quality bar and limit API access for 3rd party software.
Me as customer: oh man I'm sure glad stuff is reviewed to some quality bar and the OS limits API access.
Me as customer: oh man I'm sure glad stuff is reviewed to some quality bar and the OS limits API access.
- browsers having to go through Apple means slower updates (including for bugs or security), not needed on Mac or any other platform
- Apple forces every alternative-engine browser to use a pretty broken framework that Safari does not use, not needed on Mac or any other platform
- Apple's restrictions on alternative engines in the EU are a vast list of malicious compliance[0], making those engines a theoretical academic exercise, so they're definitely still fucking you as a consumer.
[0]: https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apples-browser-engine-ban...
Consumers in a general sense don't know much of how the world works - safe radiation exposure, food safety, drug dosing thermodynamics, household electrical wiring, airborne particulate, airline maintenance...
This is why we have a government regulatory regime to protect them. The government has to strong arm companies out of bad behavior, because consumers do not understand.
Some people who have Apple and Google stock will voice opinion against regulation. Or people who really love their devices and don't understand the harms.
But the fact is that this Titanic command of markets damages the robustness of the economy. Google and Apple are doing massive harm.
Capitalism should be hard. It should be a treadmill. You shouldn't be able to coast.
We like the market. We like evolutionary pressure. Giants this large, however, are an ecological hack that get to escape the same algorithm we subject every other company to. They created an artificial and illegal means to prevent themselves from facing competition. They're an invasive species picking on ecosystems that literally cannot fight back.
It's a good thing that new companies can (or could) threaten old companies. It's a renewing forest fire, a de-ossification. It rewards innovation capital rather than institutions.
Apple and Google have found a way to forever avoid this by wedging themselves in as "owners of mobile computing". These two companies own it. Period. You don't. Consumers don't. No other company can even enter into the arena. You play by their rules.
Antitrust enforcement has never been more needed. We've had two decades of devices we really only rent and don't own. Devices that strangle consumer control over how we spend our time and money.
If America doesn't do it, foreign countries seeking sovereignty should.
Just because consumers are unaware that a problem exist doesn't mean they wouldn't care if they knew.
- Companies forking over more margin and control to Apple mean they have to make up for it in other ways.
- Apple and Google wielding so much control removes overall choice and competition from the market.
- I sure hope Apple and Google only ever have my interests at heart because they have all the keys to the kingdom and could really screw me over.
- I wish I could do XYZ with my phone. Too bad...
- I wish there were more diverse phone SKUs. It used to be wildly competitive and we used to have all kinds of innovation because it wasn't so winner-take-all. Where's my eink low power open source phone with gpio and thermal sensors, etc.
- My car and phone feel like frenemies.
- There's still no good alternative OS for phones. Probably because it'd be impossible to make money and compete against titans.
- The company that removed manifest V2 is now forcing app signing? I wonder if they'll limit web browsing options and ad blocking soon.
- Why do I have to de-Google my phone with every update? They have tyranny of defaults (that lay people can't adjust) and just reset the defaults back to themselves every time you upgrade. Or give you scare walls and alerts asking to be default again. Lay people are probably stuck with this.
- "Google News" legitimately has half page ads and popups and that's the default experience. It is physically impossible to even read the news.
Write a page on chrome, works 90% on Firefox. But will likely works 10% on safari. Supports safari literally means support another browser (by workaround all its bugs).
Your desire for Safari to vanish is also historically short sighted. Ladybird has near-zero usage, Firefox is practically dead and is fully bought and paid for by Google, everything else is just a Chrome or Chromium fork. Safari is realistically the only thing holding back an outright Chrome monopoly with meaningful usage.
Besides these, the service worker debugger never work on my iphone device since like two major version ago.(It did not show up in the safari menu) There is no way to use it as a developer even I want to (let alone the devtool crashes and disconnects frequently)
I think web devs have too much faith in the "standard"; the WHATWG specifies anything supported by two implementations, and with Google controlling Mozilla that already feels somewhat unfair...
> Write a page on chrome, works 90% on Firefox. But will likely works 10% on safari.
Disregarding the issue that you're writing pages that only 90% work on anything but Chrome... do you have any examples of Safari misbehaving?
If it even does.
Testing in non-Chrome browsers should identify anything like this before stuff ships. It is legitimately not hard to do.
I hope it’s the correct 90%!