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Apple is killing PWA?

Maxim Saplin on February 29, 2024

The recent news about Apple killing home screen web apps in the EU made me think about why PWA never became a thing and how there's an analogy with...
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Andrew Bone

We're so back!

apple's retraction

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Ben Halpern

This makes sense. It was a weird alienating move without obvious benefit to them in the first place

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Ben Halpern

Isn't it interesting that early iPhone strategy made Apple super in on the web but then they figured out how much it paid to be super out on the web, and here we are.

There was a period where Apple was pushing the idea that: Web apps are sufficient for all third party apps and we need to obsessively improve Safari to make that vision possible.

They got pushed to open up the native ecosystem, stumbled into the App Store business model, and the rest is history.

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Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard • Edited

We get bogged down in lengthy "technical discussions" but at the end of the day, it's about who has the power.

The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
-- Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War

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Ben Halpern

For a while Google's power accumulation was generally aligned with the general blossoming of an open web and lots of new technology.

They've clearly moved to extraction mode as far as the web is concerned, they are quite well positioned to take part in a potential "authorship and copyright and reality doesn't matter much anymore" economy.

It's pretty unclear whose incentives are truly aligned with any of the good stuff we like.

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Alex Lohr

There's a big difference between flash and PWAs. The former was a closed source product that became a battery drain and pain to support on mobile, the latter is solely based on open web standards and just allows people to create an app-like experiences on iOS without Apple being able to stop you.

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Maxim Saplin • Edited

Agree, Web and Flash are completely different philosophies of how platform is developed and distributed. Yet there's a clear resemblance of how Apple pushes back a tech already adopted and liked by many - this can be one of the factors of the PWA demise in 2020s, just like Apple influenced Flash in 2010s

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Alex Lohr

While the decision not to support flash was certainly an important nail in its coffin, it's not like Apple single-handedly killed off flash. Without the important factor of web techniques gaining sufficient abilities to replace it, flash would not have died off.

As long as everyone but Apple will support PWAs, I wouldn't call it killed.

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Eljay-Adobe • Edited

Back in the day, no one could predict which web technology was going to win the web.

Would it be FutureWave/Macromedia/Adobe's Flash? First one to market that can establish a strong foothold has an excellent chance of dominating the market.

Would it be Sun/Oracle's Java-in-the-browser? With their "write once, debug everywhere" (cough) tech stack, and their deep pockets to push their solution to all the browers.

Would it be Microsoft's Silverlight? Late to the game, but never count Microsoft out β€” they have even deeper pockets, marketing chops, big brains, and the wherewithal to stay in the game to win big! (...or go home.)

We all know the answers. No. No. And... no.

None of the three big players won the internet. All of them had their fans, evangelists, and advocates. But no one β€” no one! β€” would have predicted that the internet's web applications would be won by the little engine that could: JavaScript.

JavaScript was developed under the codename Mocha, and briefly debuted under the name LiveScript before marketing rebranded it JavaScript. (After negotiating the name with Sun, to ride on Java's coattails. In hindsight, the irony.)

JavaScript was intended to be a programming language for non-programmers. In order to have small snippets of glue code embedded in the HTML to handle events, allowing for web pages to be more dynamic and interactive.

From that humble beginning, it eventually evolved into the language of the internet. The dark horse language that wasn't even competing with the big three Flash, Java, and Silverlight β€” yet still won the race. There are web apps that are 100+ KLOCs used by billions of people, every day. Incredible!

And I dare say, it's still just getting started, and we ain't seen nothin' yet!

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Maxim Saplin

IMO it is the [JS + CSS + HTML + WebKit] stack combined. JS alone has little value

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Hauke T.

I just read apples anouncement on the changes because of the EU regulations. The tone is "we are protecting our users/hardware/software, by controlling the App Store and the Browser engine."

The EU regulations are there to stop this monopoly: There should be a market. (Microsoft was forced to do this a looooong time ago - back in the XP Days)

Apple writes (highlights added by me):

Why don't users in the EU have access to Home Screen web apps?

[...]

The iOS system has traditionally provided support for Home Screen web apps by building directly on WebKit and its security architecture. That integration means Home Screen web apps are managed to align with the security and privacy model for native apps on iOS, including isolation of storage and enforcement of system prompts to access privacy impacting capabilities on a per-site basis.

Without this type of isolation and enforcement, malicious web apps could read data from other web apps and recapture their permissions to gain access to a user’s camera, microphone or location without a user’s consent. Browsers also could install web apps on the system without a user’s awareness and consent. Addressing the complex security and privacy concerns associated with web apps using alternative browser engines would require building an entirely new integration architecture that does not currently exist in iOS and was not practical to undertake given the other demands of the DMA and the very low user adoption of Home Screen web apps. And so, to comply with the DMA’s requirements, we had to remove the Home Screen web apps feature in the EU.

[...].

I don't think this was an easy decision. And I am not convinced it was a purely evil decision.

There are a lot of crappy apps on google Play. Android apps can degenerate the User Experience even of the best Android Phone. Apple tried to protect their users and their brand by disallowing content that might degenerate UX and their brands perception.

I am sure this is not the end of the story.

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Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard • Edited

There is nothing evil with disliking the effects of a given law, I think every company (and individuals) can relate to it.

Still, to have a working free market and a working democracy, the law must be above the preferences of any individual company.

Except of course when a company has so much market power that it can shapes profoundly which laws will affect it, when and how. And that's exactly how you know when the free market is broken and anti-trust need to intervene.

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Nicholas Jordan Andersen

PWA's are great tools. I hate to see apple warp a law that was meant to foster diversity in their ecosystem into a way for them to exert more control.

This will definitely be a blow to the future of PWA's. We'll just have to wait and see how large the damage will be.

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Mandar Badve

Excellent piece! It brings back memories of CSS compatibility challenges and transitioning from Flash/Silverlight to HTML5. It's been a remarkable journey, and I'm optimistic about what lies ahead.

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Frank Jonen

Apple's resistance to Flash was long coming. I had Flash blockers installed on every browser long before Flash died. It was a massive pest that only did one thing good, ruin battery life and crash browsers. Today this would probably be called a poor carbon footprint.