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Comment by justthistime_ | Hacker News Reader

> The way to get Apple's attention is for Google or Firefox > to develop a superior browser and browsing experience on > Android, that users take notice is missing from iOS and is > regarded as a USP for Android.

I think not suffering from websites saying "sorry, iOS is not supported" qualifies as a superior browsing experience.

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But Safari for iOS is still pretty standards compliant, performant and modern, and far better than Android as a whole when you consider the huge chunk of Android users on an old version of Android that will never see an update (the same users who will just use the default baked in browser). Saying iOS isn't supported would generally be artificial constraints on the part of the site builder on principle, not an actual practical issue with serving them a web page.

You'd easily be shown to be the asshole when a jailbreaker or someone with a proxy spoofed their user agent and loaded your page just fine. Not supporting a browser without a valid technical reason that the layperson can ever sort of understand will totally undermine your position.

FUD! https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html

Only 5.9% of Android users are on obsolete 2.x. 5.1% are on 4.0.x, for which Chrome was just EOL'ed at version 42 (http://blog.chromium.org/2015/03/freezing-chrome-for-ice-cre...), which compares very favorably to the current and previous versions of Safari (http://caniuse.com/#compare=chrome+42,safari+7,safari+7.1,sa...).

Sure if enough popular Internet properties targeting the mobile web decided to commit commercial suicide and started purposely ignoring one of its most lucrative user-bases. Should enough websites do this, I'd expect it would just increase the appeal of native Apps.

Ultimately I'd think the only noticable effect it would have is the 2s it takes users to navigate away from the site to never return again.

Reading the threads on this page has really solidified for me that this is the exact same phenomenon as the IE winter. Your comment (and a few others) are word for word the argument for why everybody had to keep supporting IE6 for all those years. You're totally right, of course; it's just a shame because we were just beginning to get excited that this problem had been solved!

This was solidified for me years ago: back when people used to get worked up about Apple vs Android[1], any talk about the negatives of restricting browser choice, keyboard choice, etc was met with "not everyone wants a platform that they can completely hack to run Gentoo lol, most people just want a phone that works". Hearing people say that on HN without even a hint of self-awareness of the actual danger of arbitrarily limiting choice on a platform was shocking, but I got over it years ago.

[1] For the life of me, I have never understood how childish one has to be to have an _emotional response_ to something like that. Whenever people would ask me my opinion and I'd state why I chose X over Y, they'd project "Wow you really hate Apple" onto me for some reason.

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