Honestly, aren't your comments as much an example of Apple bias as what you're commenting on, but with the sign reversed?
- Ban flash. Biggest competition to native apps.
- Cripple the iOS web browser just enough that web apps trying to have native style performance will struggle.
- Release their own map to push Google out of their ecosystem. When that didn't work now they are trying this.
Apple's business model is pretty simple. Aquire a user through very aggressive marketing converted into a device purchase. Use that device purchase a an entry point to take over all points of monetary action of that user. That means nothing(web, flash, credit card) should go through anything but them. You don't need bias to see something as obvious as this now is.
That's not why that happened. Flash wasn't "banned," Apple chose not to allow support for it in Mobile Safari from the beginning. It was never removed or banned.
Flash was a dog. Power hungry, slow, inefficient. I recently had to touch the codebase for an Adobe Air iOS app and the runtime is pretty horrific. Adobe never got flash good enough for mobile, and Apple was right to call them out on it.
Flash was never any good on Android either. Otherwise it'd still be around.
> Cripple the iOS web browser just enough that web apps trying to have native style performance will struggle.
Mobile Safari is a good browser. It's fast and is not crippled. It consistently beats browsers on other mobile platforms despite running on often slower hardware. A great mobile web browser is what made the iPhone a great product.
> Release their own map to push Google out of their ecosystem. When that didn't work now they are trying this.
This is because Apple's contract with Google expired and they had to renew on terms that they could not agree to. My recollection of this is that Google wanted a bigger branding presence on the iOS home screen and refused to license mapping data for turn-by-turn navigation (I believe they wanted the Apple-developed Google Maps application to be branded "Google Maps" rather than just "Maps"). Apple saw no way out aside from investing in their own mapping data and infrastructure.
> and lo it came to pass. Yes! Ha!
So Apple jettisoned Google to do it themselves. Then Apple discovered that mapping isn't nearly as easy as Google made it look when their users were unhappy with a decidedly inferior product.
There is no way Apple was going to brand iOS, which is understandable — that would be like seeing an "Intel Inside" sticker on a MacBook.
And there was no way Google would just "hand over" a differentiating feature of Android to their biggest competitor.
Google, Mozilla disable Flash over security concerns http://www.marketwatch.com/story/google-mozilla-disable-flas...
Even this Flash proponent admits, "Jobs was slightly ahead of his time" in You don't have to be a villain to say Flash must die* http://www.macworld.com/article/2948131/software-web/you-don...
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Banning Flash has been a boon to HTML5 uptake.
YouTube Switches to the HTML5 Player in Chrome http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2014/05/youtube-switches-to...
RIP Flash: Why HTML5 will finally take over video and the Web this year http://thenextweb.com/dd/2014/04/19/rip-flash-html5-will-tak...
How Adobe Is Moving on From Flash to Embrace HTML5 http://www.cio.com/article/2376661/internet/how-adobe-is-mov...
In other words Apple has helped HTML5. Intentionally crippling the iOS web browser? What usaphp said.
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As to Maps, Google pushed themselves out: Apple ditched Google Maps over turn-by-turn navigation spat http://news.yahoo.com/apple-ditched-google-maps-over-turn-tu...
That was a version of flash, and after the bug was fixed, it was reenabled. How is that in any way comparable?
"The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. And so, you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. They can make a call, they can send an email, they can look up a location on Google Maps.
And guess what? There’s no SDK that you need! You’ve got everything you need if you know how to write apps using the most modern web standards to write amazing apps for the iPhone today. So developers, we think we’ve got a very sweet story for you. You can begin building your iPhone apps today."
There was no SDK initially. Webapps were the _only_ way to put your app on the iPhone. My understanding is that developers demanded an SDK, though.
It seems that part of the reason for not wanting native Apps is because Jobs felt that policing an app store would be too difficult. As to whether the current browser is purposely crippled for the sake of directing people to native apps, I think that might be a bit difficult to prove. Is it perhaps instead that native apps naturally provide better performance, developers demanded it, and so Apple focuses its resources there? Shrug.
Some more detail here: http://www.cultofmac.com/125180/steve-jobs-was-originally-de...
Are you saying that web apps run on android browser smoother than on iOs Safari? I don't think so...
> "Ban Flash. Biggest competition for apps".
I think Flash was banned because it's crap in terms of security and battery drainer, not much because its a competition to apps.
You seem to be pretty bias in your comments...
> User experience is what Apple puts above pretty much everything else, and they’ve decided that they don’t like it the experience available through the ad-supported web, and so they’re going to do something about it.
My points were evidence to the contrary of that statement. I was not discussing the motivations of Google in regards to their users.
My point is that Apple's business model is about expansive control of a highly profitable user base. It uses an expensive device purchase(which increases the pain point of a user leaving) through aggressive marketing to attempt to be the primary source of as many monetary behaviors of that user as possible.
Flash(and upcoming AIR) was at the time a true contender for becoming the cross platform desktop/native type application interface. Once Apple banned Flash, companies moved away from the platform and it withered.
Since you brought up the Android browser, we can use it as an example of a company who would prefer to increase the use of the web. Google actively tries to increase adoption of the mobile Chrome browser as it cannot control the the updating schedules of phone vendors. Bases upon browser statistics it appears Google is having some success.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-US-monthly-201406-...
Google is not any better, but we can look at the difference in their behavior as an example of a difference in business model. Google and Facebook are somewhat dependent(at this time) on some attributes of the web. This difference in these companies(including Apple) can be shown in their support for deep linking.
http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/james-turner-urx-deep-link...
And to prove I am not picking on Apple directly, part of Google's business model is to leverage their search results to expand into other monetary behaviors of their users as well.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/15/8613839/google-adding-buy-...
Technology implementations by large tech companies are typically more indicative of their business intentions as opposed to their abilities. I'm not saying that Apple is any worse than any other company. Only that their particular business model at this time is, in my opinion, the most dangerous to the overall ecosystem and tech economy.
Simply not true. Flash continued to be made available for Android, and Adobe boasted of the number of installs it would have (200m by the end of 2011, it claimed [1]). Apple had, and has, a small share of the mobile and desktop market. But nobody could get Flash to work well on mobile. That is why it died.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2011/feb/14/mobil... (disclosure: by me. I was there.)
Well, except native apps didn't exist when the iPhone launched and Steve Jobs was famously opposed to them.
> Cripple the iOS web browser just enough that web apps trying to have native style performance will struggle.
If you think that, you should watch this https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2015/?id=501
"Ban flash."
Because Flash was buggy as all hell, and ran like absolute shit on mobile. Remember the short time it was available for Android? Remember how no one really used it, because it was crap? Remember how Adobe gave up because they couldn't do it worth a damn?
"- Cripple the iOS web browser just enough that web apps trying to have native style performance will struggle."
You're gonna need a citation for that one.
"Release their own map to push Google out of their ecosystem. When that didn't work now they are trying this."
Yeah, no. Apple and Google had a dispute over licensing. They were unable to resolve their differences, and so they parted ways amicably. Google Maps is still freely available for iOS, and developers are still able to use it in their apps.
"You don't need bias to see something as obvious as this now is."
No, but apparently you need a tinfoil hat.
How about all the different ways Apple breaks the web for its own sake? Things like the HTTP Protocol are fundamentally broken by Apple, and this is not ok.
They are a despicable company, a dragon only interested in increasing its cash reserves. I do not understand the support they are getting from the developer community, they shit on them constantly, make their life difficult, and forces them to buy Apple.
This latest move is even more despicable as its pushed as positive for the user, landing them good PR, when in fact its all about levering Apple's stronghold on users to push iAds. They are a company for profit, and their history shows they don't do anything for users, they do it for them.
They should be criticized and hounded as a toxic company for the web.
What do you mean?
The only time recently I've opened Safari on the desktop is to debug some obscure Javascript deficiency that only existed on that browser that also happened to exist in iOS.
Toady Google have more resources invested in Blink than Apple do in Safari, but don't forget how we got here.
There's no telling where things would be if Google had gone a different route. What if they bought Opera? What if they forked KHTML themselves? It could have been better, it could have been worse. I don't speculate on that, I just react to what I see. Right now, to me, Google has been better about moving things forward with Webkit than Apple has in quite a while.
Safari is just a wrapper around WebKit which is an open source project with many contributors. Yes the engine may be deficient in some areas or make choices not supported by other engines but I have never seen any malicious intent to destroy the web or undermine the standards.
No, but making up your own facts, like you have, is.
"Things like the HTTP Protocol are fundamentally broken by Apple"
[Citation Needed]
"They are a company for profit"
As opposed to whom? Google?
Content-Range does not work, Cache directive are ignored to speed up user experience on Safari.