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Comment by JoshTheGeek | Hacker News Reader

They have no other choice; Apple won't accept apps with custom web rendering engines.

How can Apple get away with that? I am genuine interested! Sounds pretty much like the same thing Microsoft did with Internet Explore back in the day, except they didn't force you to use their rendering engine, but shipped the OS with their browser as default?

Microsoft was a monopoly. Apple is a niche player. Antitrust laws don't apply to companies with 20% of the market.

Actually, iOS has 42.4% of the smartphone market in the U.S. according to http://www.cnet.com/news/android-loses-some-us-market-share-...

There are other markets than the US and the antitrust laws were employed against Microsoft in the EU.

The US antitrust case[1] referred specifically to browser vendor lock-in.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.

As did the European case, ultimately forcing them to give a choice to the user which default browser to download, if I recall correctly.

Still, Android has ~52% of the market. The antitrust laws used against Microsoft were due to the fact that Windows was nearly all of the market, both home and business. Plus, people using Apple now can switch off of it, unlike Microsoft at the time which had no viable options.

I am equally surprised.

Because their platform, their rules? IDK, I think it's perfectly acceptable to limit what you can do on someone's platform, since after all allowing anything on your platform will cause a lot of crap to appear - like a lot of stuff on the Android platform before it changed to the Play Store and Google started being a bit more strict about using their platform.

Restricting what developers can and cannot do on a platform allows Apple to give more guarantees and reliability in terms of performance and battery usage, as well as security and stability. Those are the primary reasons behind Apple's restrictions on the iOS platform.

You are only partially correct in your analysis. Yes, controlling the platform can lead to a better user experience. But how does banning browser engines lead to better app quality? It doesn't. If you look at the history of app store restrictions, you'll find that any app that provides an open platform or programming environment has been banned. That is because it takes the control out of apple's hands. It's a power grab.

It may be a power grab, but it also provides protection from malware that customers value.

Some restrictions do. Some restrictions have economic benefits for Apple.

This one has both.

What are the performance, security and stability benefits of removing native print-to-PDF functionality from iOS? It was supported by Apple in early iOS releases.

Rendering engines are okay. Its the Javascript execution engine that is not allowed.

You can render all the HTML you want, you just can't allow untrusted code to be executed.

Well, since you can't use the native javascript engine with a separate rendering engine, there's not much difference though is there?

(if you could, everyone would just do that to get dynamic behavior using javascript in their apps as a scripting language)

Not all content created with web technologies and renderable with an HTML/CSS rendering engine require Javascript

> Rendering engines are okay. Its the Javascript execution engine that is not allowed.

No, they must use WebKit:

"Apps that browse the web must use the iOS WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript"

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

You can render HTML content with a custom rendering engine - for example ePub ebooks are essentially bundled HTML + CSS content - there are several HTML rendering engines that read ePub ebooks but don't use Webkit.

Also, you can build a UI using web languages and render to native controls, all without using WebKit if you'd like.

Right, rendering HTML is fine. As long as you don't download it from the internet on-demand, or so.

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