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Open Letter to Tim Cook: Sabotaging Web Apps Is Indefensible
(letter.open-web-advocacy.org)
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this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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Someone fill me in:
Can they really force this once EU opens the gates to the third-party app stores?
They will try. This is about OS-level APIs. In order for a browser to to install and run PWAs, it needs certain OS APIs for e.g. home screen installation, storage and notifications. iOS currently has these APIs but Safari severely limits what you can do with it. Now the DMA will force Apple to accept other browsers, which have no such limitations. So, Apple now wants to remove these APIs altogether and kill PWA support outright, before that portion of the DMA takes effect.
There probably will be a lawsuit and Apple will probably lose, but it will take years to resolve that. And in the mean time PWAs remain dead and the only way on the iOS home screen in paying the 30% app store cut.
I see. So it doesn't look good for now. Thanks for the insight!
Isn't it the other way around? Afaik the EU commission investigates them, makes a decision, and sets a due date for Apple to comply or pay a potentially hefty fine. It would be Apple who'd have to sue against that, and they'd have to pay the fine until a court confirms or nullifies it.
The fine will have to be pretty hefty to cancel out the risk to Apple of PWAs taking off.
A free and open app platform sitting above the OS is surely a terrible threat to both Google and Apple.
Google and apple both allow pwas right now though, don't they? I don't think it's a threat. It's just apple trying to say fu to the eu. The eu will slp a billion dollar fine on them. They'll pay it.
A PWA running in a browser engine that they can’t control can have access to features that they can’t vet and restrict. If PWAs aren’t restricted to 50MB of storage and have near feature-parity with native apps then they’ll eventually lose the ability to enforce their revenue cut on In-App Purchases.
Not sure how it works on android, but on iOS I’m pretty sure this means that mobile game devs will start shipping games as WebGL/WASM with asset streaming and implement their own payment channels for micro-transactions.
Apple can’t risk it and I believe they will fight it tooth and nail to the bitter end.
Up to 10% of global revenue, 20% if they keep repeating the same offense, so nothing to sneeze at.
Is that revenue from all sources, the mobile division, or just the revenue from this particular mechanism (essentially zero)?
Pretty much all sources as far as I understand it. The exact definition is here if you're interested (Article 5).
So I'm not sure what "the undertaking concerned" means exactly, but it's probably the mobile portion of the business (and maybe just app store sales). But I guess that's yet to be determined.
The article even explicitly lists subsidiaries and holdings with >50% of the ownership or voting rights, so I don't think it's limited to just one department or devision of a company. But yea, we'll have to wait and see how this is applied in a real case.
Yes because what they are doing is just removing websites from the app-store. Other app-stores might add those websites to their store if they want but for the user it is almost always better to just save the website to their homescreen, which gives the exact same UX as previous web-apps but now you don't need to go to the app-store to download it, the app takes up no storage on your device and the web app can't access your privacy sensitive device IDs that might be used for cross-app tracking.