I wonder if there was some sort of back channeling with the EU to determine that “actually this is fine, we don’t care about rendering engine competition for PWAs, WebKit-only is better than removing them.”

The law ultimately only requires changes to features the EU cares about.

The notion that Apple was purposefully trying to kill PWAs never made sense in light of their significant investment in supporting PWAs over the last four years, down to recruiting industry rockstars such as Jen Simmons.

Nobody who was screaming bloody murder ever tried to reconcile that incongruence, much less succeeded.

What’s more likely is that Apple’s lawyers went with the most careful interpretation of the DMA, concluded that they’d have to facilitate Home Screen install for other browsers as well, figured it wasn’t worth the engineering effort, especially on short notice, and instead just deactivated it for Safari as well.

Then, after all the bloody murder that was being screamed about, the EU started to inquire[0] both with Apple as well as developers about the consequences for PWAs. Apple was told that their interpretation was too strict (or that they will be given more time to implement it for other browsers, but less likely because such decisions are typically made public) and that they’re fine (for now) with PWAs running in WebKit.

0: https://9to5mac.com/2024/02/26/apple-blocking-web-apps/

Investing in PWAs for four years is only going to get you so far when you’re eight years behind the competition.

Obviously I’m making numbers up here but to my perspective Apple’s recent investments (bringing them to a level still behind competitors) has a lot more to do with staving off legal threats to their 30% cut on native apps (e.g. the Epic lawsuit) than any benevolence towards the web platform.

I think it was saying that if Apple wanted to kill PWA it would have made more sense to just not make those investments over the past four years.

Apple wants everything to go through their store. (1) so they can ban anything they don't like. (2) they can get their 30% (can't get 30% of websites)

They only added support for push notifications to iOS in 2023 (7 years after Firefox and 8 years after Chrome on Android), right after the UK regulator started its investigation in mobile ecosystems.

wrong, Apple only started implementing the bare minimum because they felt the heat from devs & feared the legal consequences for their anti-competitive behavior.

Apple still has the unquenchable desire to kill PWAs, they will just keep sabotaging them more subtly. Apple will keep up their shenanigans until the bitter end, but I hope that the EU will have none of it.

Which non-Chromium competitors are you speaking to here? What are some examples of standards-track features that they implement that Apple doesn't?

I don’t think this speaks to intention, the investments that have been made and are still being made bring with them a cost, both in a monetary sense and in other ways. Regardless of the separate question with regards to them having been able to catch up with the competition.

A generous interpretation, with the presupposed premise that they haven’t been able to catch up, could say that it warrants a more favorable interpretation of their intentions if they were willing to invest after having lagged behind for so long, because the required investment would be greater and the pay off less clear.

> (bringing them to a level still behind competitors)

Let’s be honest here. When people say something like this, they’re mainly thinking of Chrome/Chromium-based browsers.

Google is known to have no qualms supporting certain things that both Mozilla and Apple are uncomfortable with, while at the same time implementing a bunch of stuff that isn’t standardized.

On the whole, Safari/WebKit has roughly met Mozilla’s level of support for frameworks and APIs and even surpassed Mozilla on certain things (especially desktop). Of course if the benchmark is just Chromium, then none of it will ever be enough, then again, Mozilla doesn’t seem to catch a lot of flack for drawing a line in the sand in terms of support.

Other than that, Safari seems to be doing great on test suites/benchmarks that focus on progress such as the annual Interop. Consistently[0] keeping up[1] over the years[2], and sometimes coming out on top[3].

> has a lot more to do with staving off legal threats to their 30% cut on native apps (e.g. the Epic lawsuit) than any benevolence towards the web platform.

I tend to stay clear with attributing maleficence or less than generous intentions without something substantial to back it up. Especially when behavior seems to contradict such attributions.

For example, if that where the main motivator then I’d expect a bare minimum approach and Apple dragging their feet, like we see with DMA implementations (e.g., only allowing what must be allowed in the EU instead of globally), instead we not only see improvement of PWA support, in part beyond what Mozilla supports, but also direct contributions of standards that PWAs rely on in the form of improvements..

0: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2021?stable

1: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2023?stable

2: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2024

3: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022?stable

Unless there’s someone else?

Those apps are no more going to leave the App Store and go to the web than they are going to leave the Google Pay Store. In app purchases monetize too well and people aren’t going to put their credit cards on every third party website.

That’s not even to mention all of the ways that you can pay via in app purchases that you can’t pay via the web and all of the kids with phones without credit cards attached.

If it’s only Apple, then why aren’t Android developers creating great PWAs to escape the same 30%?

...Microsoft did exactly that, though:

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/30/hands-on-xbox-cloud-gam...

I don't really understand the rest of your argument. "Of course developers aren't going to use the web instead of apps, it's a way worse experience!" is precisely the point in criticizing Apple letting the web platform languish. They have a vested interest in making sure the in-app experience remains superior to web experience because of their 30% cut.

And Microsoft did that not because they didn’t want to be in the store, but because at the time Apple wouldn’t allow them. Yes I disagree with this.

If PWAs could be made one to one with apps - and today games like Candy Crush could be web apps - game developers who make up 90% of App Store revenue still wouldn’t give up the direct access to users wallets they get from in app purchases.

So why aren't developers using them? Is Apple wrong? Are they not a serviceable alternative to the app store?

Android has better support than iOS, and Android's userbase spends less money on apps and is more often monetized through ads. So it's not the payment platform that causes developers to avoid PWAs, otherwise they'd be used all over the place on Android.

Android also has a semi-thriving community of Open Source applications through F-Droid that are privacy preserving and completely non-monetized. But installing apps through F-Droid is complicated. And F-Droid has zero user reviews. So it's clearly not the ease of delivery or advertisement that's causing those developers to ship native apps that need to be sideloaded through a complicated process that involves going into your phone settings and turning on sideloading instead of just shipping web apps.

So what's left? Well, invasive apps like Facebook/Twitter could ship as PWAs (with the caveat that their notification support would be worse). But they'd be giving up tracking ability by doing so. Web browsers are better secured than phones are. Facebook on iOS has an easier time tracking your behavior than Facebook in Safari does. Facebook on iOS could even at one point (and might still be able to, I can't find a source that this is patched) push custom code into web views of other articles through its iOS native app. So yeah, they're obviously interested in shipping an iOS app because (frankly) the Safari team is better at security than Apple's iOS developers are.

The only reason left that explains that behavior is the fact that PWAs on both Android and iOS are severely lacking in APIs that would enable anything other than shallow internet-connected services. They are not alternatives to the app store in their current state, no matter how much Apple pretends otherwise. Notification support on Android for PWAs is a joke, it's basically only usable for advertisements. And it's even worse on iOS. If you want to make an alarm app as a PWA, it is literally impossible to do that reliably. Want to make an RSS reader? I have no clue how that would be done as a PWA, I don't think it can be done without a web server handling the article fetching.

----

And I'm sure you would say at this point that there are tons of apps that don't need this stuff and that really it's not about capabilities it's about payments and about what the users want and where they look for apps...

And I would just repeat your question back to you -- there are a ton of apps that are not monetizing through app store payments that aren't shipping PWAs. There are a ton of apps that are not looking for mass-market appeal that are not shipping PWAs. And Apple is arguing in court that they could. But they're not. They're not using PWAs on iOS or on Android. They're not shipping PWAs when they rely on advertising. They're not shipping PWAs when they would benefit tremendously from not needing to pay so many commissions to Apple. Even when they're Open Source and don't monetize at all, they're not shipping PWAs.

Why not? What do those developers know that Apple either doesn't know or is pretending not to know? There's no NewPipe for iOS shipping through Safari. Why is that?

https://www.bigabid.com/apple-app-store-vs-google-play-store....

In that case, if PWAs were good enough on Android and they could avoid the 30% cut, why bother making native Android apps at all?

All of the HN commenters blame mean old Apple for holding the web back. But the fact is that every mobile platform at one point announced that “you can make good apps using web technology” - Apple, Google, Microsoft, Palm, and RIM. They’ve all sucked

Even before then, Sun promised that you could make great cross platform GUI apps and they sucked.

Today Electron apps are, battery draining, memory hogging monstrosities.

And the tracking thing is a non starter. You have much better ways to track on the we then through native apps - at least on iOS with a much better permission model.

To the first approximation - no one cares about PWAs - not users, not companies.

I don't want to skirt too close to HN guidelines here, but I'm genuinely curious if you actually read my comment or not.

This is exactly what I asked you. If PWAs are (as Apple claims) good enough alternatives to the app store, why isn't anyone using them?

You can complain about Electron, but developers build Electron apps. They don't build PWAs. Because Electron apps are actually a feasible alternative to more native GUIs, and PWAs are not. The question you and I are asking (why isn't anyone using PWAs) reveals exactly how bullcrap Apple's legal arguments about PWAs are. They are not reasonable alternatives to the app store.

> All of the HN commenters blame mean old Apple for holding the web back

I don't blame Apple exclusively for holding the web back. They're a part of it, but so is Google. I don't think I've ever had much good to say about Google on here, and as the US and EU are actively proving right now, it is possible to pursue regulation for multiple companies at the same time.

> You have much better ways to track on the we[b] then through native apps - at least on iOS with a much better permission model.

This is not true by any metric. Native apps have more access to fingerprinting vectors than web apps do, are capable of requesting deeper levels of user information like contacts. Native Facebook on iOS got called out for injecting custom code into the in-app web view when users clicked on links within Facebook for 3rd-party sites. That's something that's not possible to do in any modern web browser.

Native apps are indisputably easier to use to fingerprint and track users on both iOS and Android.

Even if you're unfamiliar with the technical side of this, you can still think of it this way: if apps like Facebook had an easier time tracking you on the web than on mobile devices, they wouldn't try to get you to install mobile apps. They would force you to use the website. The reason why Facebook ships an iOS app is because it is easier to track you via iOS than through the Facebook website.

And your example of how Facebook can track you by knowing what links you clicked on off the site from the app, of course Facebook could do that from the web.

There are at least a dozen ways to do fingerprinting o the web

https://fingerprint.com/blog/browser-fingerprinting-techniqu...

And what do you think is going to happen if there are more native APIs exposed in browsers?

Facebook could insert custom code into 3rd-party domains that have no relationship with it?

No, it can't. If Facebook could perform arbitrary XSS on 3rd-party websites it had no relationship with when you clicked on links on the Facebook website, that would be rightly treated as critical zero-day security flaw in any web browser.

I mean, you're saying you're familiar with this stuff, but you're also saying that Facebook can do arbitrary XSS via links, so forgive me for doubting you. Of course fingerprinting is possible on the web. It's easier with native apps. The web at least tries to shut down fingerprinting vectors; native platforms like iOS largely don't. Far from shutting down fingerprinting vectors, both Android and iOS have platform-supported device-specific advertising IDs that don't even require fingerprinting. At least Apple (eventually) started clearing the low, low bar of forcing applications to ask permission to access it, but that's a far cry from the kind of sandboxing and site/app isolation that happens in Safari.

> And what do you think is going to happen if there are more native APIs exposed in browsers?

I'm sorry, your defense for privileging native apps over browser apps is "if browsers could do everything native apps could do, it would be a nightmare for privacy"?

What do you think that says about the privacy and security of native apps?

If you click on a link from Facebook on the web - the only reason you would view a page in a web view on the app - you don’t think FB could know that you clicked on the link?

I also see that you ignored the dozen or so well known ways that you can track someone across the web.

Are you really saying you’ve never searched for something on one site and seen ads follow you around on other sites?

> At least Apple (eventually) started clearing the low, low bar of forcing applications to ask permission to access it, but that's a far cry from the kind of sandboxing and site/app isolation that happens in Safari.

I just cited a list of ways that apps can’t track you across the web that you keep ignoring.

I'm pretty sure there are many other APIs that PWAs want, that native apps have, that Firefox and Chrome offer on Android, but since 3rd party browsers are not supported on iOS, don't exist there.

That to me says Apple doesn't want PWAs.

I just opened a web app saved to the Home Screen, and it’s both full screen and rotates orientation.

The intent here is likely to avoid the messes that could be caused by arbitrary sites being able to fullscreen and confuse or trick the user. Requiring a user interaction to fullscreen doesn’t help here much, it’s easy to attach the function to an innocuous looking link or image that baits users into tapping them.

(1) Firefox and Chrome has shipped with that ability for 10+ years on Android and the world hasn't ended

(2) PWAs are effectively apps. Native apps can do that those things so there's no difference in terms of risks. You could certainly make it so web pages can't but PWAs can.

Also, no, Safari PWAs do not do allow you to lock the screen orientation

Another thing with EU, you can ask them. And normally, first, you ask them when something is questionable. This either didn’t happen, or Apple didn’t wait, or they already know what is the response. This was clearly a PR move.

So it’s totally understandable when people have problems with Apple, how they handled this.

> Apple's move also comes after a threat to look into the issue by European Commission authorities.

> "We are indeed looking at the compliance packages of all gatekeepers, including Apple," the European Commission said in a statement on February 26. "In that context, we're in particular looking into the issue of progressive web apps, and can confirm sending the requests for information to Apple and to app developers, who can provide useful information for our assessment."

Apple's investment into PWA support can charitably be characterised as "begrudging". You don't need to defend this company. They have been behaving badly for a long time.

Additionally, even if Apple is still looking at PWAs as a way of staving off regulation in the EU, it still makes perfect sense that Apple is running a cost-benefit analysis on PWAs being open to other browsers. PWAs on iOS are significantly limited even after Apple's increase in support. Supporting PWAs just well enough to stave off regulation while keeping them locked down so that other browsers can not extend them or push capabilities further is entirely in Apple's interest.

----

My take is that Apple as a company would prefer not to be working on PWAs at all. But that's not really an option, because both the EU and the US are looking at regulating the app store. The next best option is to have PWAs be a serviceable but ultimately inferior option for offline-only and privacy-preserving apps (and in fact many of the APIs Apple supports are entirely unusable for offline-only apps, although to be fair that's probably more Google's fault than Apple's). Apple may very well have thought the option of a semi-supported but ultimately inferior, controlled PWA experience was off the table in the EU; or they thought that with the app store opening up they could get away with killing the platform for EU users entirely. In either case, they now seem to believe they can keep PWAs locked down to only support Safari capabilities. Maybe they're right, I'm sure Apple has more access to regulators to ask these questions than anyone else here does.

And so none of this is incompatible with the notion that Apple wants to kill PWAs. The idea that a company can completely ignore a technology for years and years and years, and then suddenly out of the blue as soon as regulation gets suggested start pouring resources into their browser and openly arguing in court, "see, you don't need to regulate us, we have a browser" -- and we're supposed to believe that this means that Apple is suddenly on board with the technology and that they don't have ulterior motives or that their motives wouldn't shift back if the threat of regulation went away.

That is just silly. Apple has had literal years to both clarify with regulators what the browser regulations would mean and to build APIs for PWAs that Microsoft and Google have been perfectly capable of creating. And in light of their last-minute scrambling, the most likely and reasonable interpretation is that Apple thought they could get away with killing off PWAs now that they were no longer useful for avoiding app store regulation, a bunch of people screamed about it, regulators reached out, and suddenly Apple had a (partial) change of heart.

Note, of course, Apple has no timeline or plans or announcements about when (or if) PWA APIs are going to stop being 1st-party privileged and exclusive to Safari, despite the fact that Apple has known that this regulation would be coming for multiple years. Which does seem to conflict a little bit with the narrative that Apple is all-aboard with PWAs as a technology and that they've been investing into them as a long-term strategy or commitment to the web, but what do I know?

---

But I really, genuinely do not see what the past 4 years prove other than that Apple's motivations about the web can change on a dime the moment that regulation enters the picture. And I think that's really revealing, and I think it says something about Apple's commitment to the web that it took the threat of regulation to make them care at all about the web as a platform, and I think it really says something about Apple's motivations that the moment that regulation went through anyway, Apple suddenly reverted back to its previous stance on PWAs and was comfortable throwing all of the PWA investment of the past 4 years out the window.

I very honestly do not understand how people can look at these series of events and say, "this proves that Apple cares about the web." We're looking at the same timeline, but it's like you're reading it in a different language than I am.

The web is more than a Chromium app runtime. We are commenting on the web without any of the random features Chrome builds because they are strategically invested in ChromeOS, and their user data harvesting business model relies on more clients sharing more data with Chrome and Google. Apple’s interest in the web cannot be gauged by how much they support technology funded and evangelized by a bunch of current and ex-Googlers that has little to do with open exchange of information. Conflating it is a strange rhetorical trick.

I'm not sure I do? The DMA was passed in January 2022. In that entire span of time when Apple was actively arguing in court that PWAs were an alternative to the app store, at no point did they ever consider building out a proper security model for PWAs that didn't rely on the assumption that Safari would be the only supported browser.

You're saying that Apple learned about the DMA before they started looking at PWAs seriously, then we got to February 2024 and suddenly Apple was caught flat-footed about browser requirements? That doesn't make sense: either they knew about the DMA and their current lack of PWA security models are an active decision that purposefully complicated compliance with the DMA, or Apple somehow wasn't thinking about the DMA in which case it's kind of silly to say that it disproves anything about their apparent web strategies.

This is a situation where the excuse makes Apple seem more suspicious, not less. Apple knows in 2022 that the DMA is coming. In February 2024 out of the blue they announce that they're shutting down PWA support. If that's not strategic, it's at least wildly incompetent. And I don't think that Apple is wildly incompetent -- I think that announcement was strategic.

> So if Apple was acting to proactively stave off regulation

I'll also note that this is not a theory, Apple is actively arguing in the US that PWAs mean that it shouldn't be regulated. I don't really understand the contention here, the way I see it Apple is saying that PWAs are a proactive strategy to stave off regulation.

We can disagree about their motivations beyond that regulation, about whether they would consider dropping support in the absence of regulation, but it is just a fact that Apple started investing more heavily in Safari around the same time that regulation arguments started popping up in both Europe and the US, and it is just a fact that Apple has proactively put forward PWAs as an argument in court cases as to why it shouldn't be regulated.

Is it really that weird to connect those dots?

----

> Apple’s interest in the web cannot be gauged by how much they support technology funded and evangelized by a bunch of current and ex-Googlers

Apple's support and advocacy for PWAs is pathetic even ignoring Chrome's support. It's not like Chrome has good PWA support, the entire notifications API is obviously designed by an advertising company with zero real input from any stakeholders other than advertisers.

Ideally, investment from Apple into the PWA ecosystem would mean not leaving the entire PWA specification to be written entirely by an advertising company, it would mean proactively getting involved in the process. It would mean asking questions like, "aside from Google, who on earth does it benefit that notifications have to be triggered by a remote server and can't be scheduled locally?"

The state of PWAs is as much a story about the apathy of every other company besides Google as it is a story about Apple holding back on basic support for extremely needed features like reliable offline storage. I'm not giving Apple credit for sitting back and twiddling its thumbs while Google ruins the spec, and then turning around and saying, "you can't expect us to implement these features, the proposed specs are terrible."

Yeah, of course they're terrible, where were you while Google was ruining them? I'm surrounded by people arguing that Safari is some kind of final bastion against Chrome hegemony, but in practice Apple does nothing with that bastion. They let Google make all the decisions, and then use that as an excuse to offer middling browser support. I'm not giving them credit for that. I'm not talking about exposing web usb support, I'm talking about things like: is it possible build an alarm clock as a PWA?

I'm not asking Apple to bow to Google's every demand, I'm asking them to act like they're a stakeholder in the web and to give even one single damn about whether it's possible to build privacy-respecting offline webapps. Apple's apathy towards influencing or pushing the PWA web standards process in a productive direction is just as much a problem as their apathy towards supporting obviously beneficial capabilities like icon badges. Apple defers power to Google and then uses that as an excuse for further inaction.

No one thought removing them in the EU was the first step to removing them everywhere.

Jen Simmons isn't a "rock star."

Hiring someone with a lot of Twitter followers to do something doesn't preclude the company from stopping doing something.

I think everyone over 30 in tech has seen that first hand. Couple right off the top of my head for Apple: Graeme Devine, Max Howell...

In general, it is important for discussions to have nuance. I'm sure you've seen some un-nuanced discussions that I haven't. However, escalating rhetoric to condemn lack of nuance in others rhetoric should be reconsidered.

Claiming that Apple is trying to “kill” PWAs is in and of itself histrionic. Especially when behavioral evidence that clearly points to the opposite is completely ignored and the bad faith intents are attributed wholly based on “vibes”. My categorizing that as screaming bloody murder isn’t an escalation in rhetoric[0] in the slightest.

> Jen Simmons isn't a "rock star." It’s a figure of speech within the industry, granted, it typically also implies big ego issues, so perhaps the term isn’t so suitable when it comes to Simmons.

> Hiring someone with a lot of Twitter followers

Trying to diminish someone’s accomplishments and relevance within an industry by pretending they “just have a lot of Twitter followers” does nothing to refute my arguments. She’s one of 82 web developers with a Wiki bio and one of 177 programmers, that alone signifies notability.

Point is that that she’s a high profile programmer and web developer and those come at a premium. That, plus the significant efforts made in the last four years to not only support PWAs but also improve standards, runs counter to the notion that Apple has ill will towards PWAs.

While she has spearheaded a lot of the investment in PWAs, for the purposes of this debate I only brought her up to emphasize Apple’s investments in making improvements.

Even with Simmons out of the equation there’s still four years of significant engineering efforts to reconcile.

> doesn't preclude the company from stopping doing something. You’re begging the question here. Without you substantiating the implication that Apple has stopped improving PWAs, you’re just throwing around empty words.

Nevertheless, it’s clear Apple hasn’t stopped their efforts on PWAs, given that the next Safari update will, again, include a slew of improvements to the benefit of PWAs as can be seen in the Safari Technology Preview release notes[1].

I’m amenable to debate this further, provided you put in some effort into make a credible case with substantiated arguments and you can keep the tone policing to yourself.

0: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/scream%20bloody%2...

1: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-technology-...

That is a statement about relevance and I would argue to be a “rock star” you also have to have a lot of accomplishments.

You might not agree that she is a rock start but you did make comments about her relevance (“twitter followers” etc)

This is immediately clear when, immediately after these two words, I mention Twitter followers, clearly indicating I believe they have fame and relevance.

It's abundantly clear when I spell out that companies don't make product decisions based on famous hires. (n.b. rock stars get to dictate the concert and album schedule)

It's ever the more clear when I name famous and relevant people as similes.

It's absolutely abundantly clear once you notice I never used the words famous and relevant, or words with stems of the same.

It's a fools errand to spend time imagining thoughts in other people's heads that twist their words into insults of other people.

Just shows the poster read the relevant threads on this very site.

> The gatekeeper shall not require end users to use, or business users to use, to offer, or to interoperate with, an identification service, a web browser engine or a payment service, or technical services that support the provision of payment services, such as payment systems for in-app purchases, of that gatekeeper in the context of services provided by the business users using that gatekeeper’s core platform services.

And they cannot make self-preferencing on their products.

> The gatekeeper shall not treat more favourably, in ranking and related indexing and crawling, services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself than similar services or products of a third party. The gatekeeper shall apply transparent, fair and non-discriminatory conditions to such ranking.

> The gatekeeper shall not restrict technically or otherwise the ability of end users to switch between, and subscribe to, different software applications and services that are accessed using the core platform services of the gatekeeper, including as regards the choice of Internet access services for end users.

And Safari has been explicitly designated as a separate core platform service. There's no room for this kind of interpretation in the view of enforcement entity. Apple is just trying to buy time by pretending ignorance.

There is no such consumer-driven market for in-app UI libraries, be they WebKit-based or not. The "consumers" in such a market would be the app vendors, and in fact this is an area well-served by existing products from competing vendors. That's clearly not what the DMA is trying to regulate.

As for your argument about core platform services, the app store is a core platform service and (I’m pretty sure) uses WebKit internally, at least for some of its pages in login and payment flows, and similar for various iCloud-related functions accessible from Settings.

I’ve read the DMA, you don’t have to be condescending.

> No, DMA wording made it very clear that it's about web browser engine.

You follow this up by quoting a clause that manages core platform services.

What it says is:

> The gatekeeper shall not require [people] to use, to offer or interoperate with [stuff] of that gatekeeper in the context of services provided by [third party devs] who use the gatekeeper’s core platform services.

A good example where this is applicable is the App Store, which is designated as a core platform service. PWAs aren’t designated as core platform service and there’s also an argument to be made that web developers aren’t considered “third party devs” (or as the DMA calls them “business users” due to a lack of agreement between Apple and them.

> And they cannot make self-preferencing on their products.

Same here. This one is even narrower because it’s only limited to preferential treatment in the sense of “ranking and related indexing and crawling”

> The gatekeeper shall not treat more favourably [in ranking and related stuff] [their own products and services] than [similar products and services by others]

This applies to ranking apps in the App Store. It has no bearing whatsoever on PWAs unless somehow Apple starts ranking PWAs in a list and then chooses to rank their own PWAs higher.

The other one is also much narrower than you’re reading it.

> The gatekeeper [shall not prevent users from switching to and subscribing to different apps including browsers]

This mainly pertains to setting default apps and switching default apps. This tangentially relates to PWAs, but installed PWAs are technically not run in Safari and instead in their own app that uses WebKit under the hood, so it’s not so clear if this would apply to PWAs.

> There's no room for this kind of interpretation in the view of enforcement entity. Apple is just trying to buy time by pretending ignorance.

I can’t distill a lifetime worth of legal experience into a tangible piece of evidence nor are there readily available authoritative sources on compliance with government regulation narrow and simple enough that I can just present them without much worry of you understanding them, especially since you’re already struggling with, what is considered in European legal standards, rather straightforward legal text.

So all I have is a trust me bro, and perhaps an appeal to common sense: Apple’s lawyers didn’t just wake up today and said to themselves “You know what, we were too cautious with interpreting the DMA a couple of weeks ago, I’m sure it’ll be fine if we keep PWA installs without implementing a way for other browsers to install them as well”, much less a variation in which they are trying to buy time by feigning ignorance.

We already know that the EU reached out to Apple about disabling PWA installs. So with that in mind, do you think the lawyers woke up one day and said “fuck it” or do you think it’s more likely the lawyers gave the go ahead after the EU told them that PWA installs as implemented in iOS are beyond the scope of the DMA?

I don't believe for a minute that the EU is OK with the WebKit restriction here, they simply haven't responded: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39565553

For all we know, the EU might be considering PWAs a thing completely orthogonal to DMA compliance, since they neither provide feature parity with native apps, nor are they widely used (at least according to Apple's measurements).

> open up anything that Safari can do (like run PWAs).

I think it would be just as valid a viewpoint to consider them an OS feature (as opposed to a browser feature). The question then is whether that OS feature would be considered protected under the DMA.

For example, it's also impossible to provide your own kernel extensions (e.g. to facilitate hardware device drivers) for iOS – but that's completely fine (as far as I understand) under the DMA, since it's not one of the covered areas like app stores, NFC payments etc.

I'm not very certain of the last point, FWIW – maybe the DMA does actually require Apple to provide, on demand, access to hardware interfaces available to their own product offerings! For example, wireless (Qi) outbound charging is supported by recent iPhones, but only works with Apple's own Magsafe power bank, and other power banks can only do inbound wireless charging and need to be charged via USB – maybe that's actually noncompliant too? That would likely kill, or at least strongly impact, Apple's MFI program in the EU – or maybe just expand it to cover all first-party hardware interfaces too?

DMA wording made it very clear that it's about browser engine, not the browser product. And Safari is designated as a core platform service.

> The gatekeeper shall not require end users to use, or business users to use, to offer, or to interoperate with, an identification service, a web browser engine or a payment service, or technical services that support the provision of payment services, such as payment systems for in-app purchases, of that gatekeeper in the context of services provided by the business users using that gatekeeper’s core platform services.

Yes, but nowhere does it say explicitly that that third-party browser engine has to also be capable of hosting PWAs. It's definitely a possible read of the DMA, but not the only plausible one, in my view.

Clause 7 Article 6 of the DMA states:

> The gatekeeper shall allow providers of services and providers of hardware, free of charge, effective interoperability with, and access for the purposes of interoperability to, the same hardware and software features accessed or controlled via the operating system or virtual assistant listed in the designation decision pursuant to Article 3(9) as are available to services or hardware provided by the gatekeeper.

> Furthermore, the gatekeeper shall allow business users and alternative providers of services provided together with, or in support of, core platform services, free of charge, effective interoperability with, and access for the purposes of interoperability to, the same operating system, hardware or software features, regardless of whether those features are part of the operating system, as are available to, or used by, that gatekeeper when providing such services.

Depends how you look at it, Chromecast is only available from Chrome. If I want a specific page to open in Chrome because I use it mainly to cast videos should I have to switch my main browser to Chrome?

Probably not how it works today and my initial comment didn't imply always open in Firefox even if not default browser, but thinking about it maybe that's how it should work, or the option to choose should be available?

Since Brexit, almost all EU member countries follow the civil law system (the only member country following common law that I can think of is Ireland, not sure if there are others). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_legal_systems

Additionally, there is no official doctrine of precedent in EU Law per se https://academic.oup.com/book/32630/chapter-abstract/2705268...

TL;DR - the authority of the courts in Europe is not the same as in USA or in the Commonwealth countries.

The European Commission announced a few days ago that they will look into the decision of apple to remove PWAs, so they more or less announced they are trying to fine them because of it.

Which means that completely removing PWAs could be the more risky choice instead of keeping them Safari-only. Completely removing PWAs already started an investigation. Keeping them Safari-only might not start an investigation at all, so it might be the lower risk.

After all I think Android also has a Chrome-only implementation for PWAs, exactly like Windows, that runs PWAs on Edge. Also back in the days when Microsoft had to give users a choice to use another browser than Internet Explorer it was also not possible to exchange Internet Explorer as the engine for many system services that used the system web view component. I think it's still the case with the current Windiws WebView2 based on Edge.

This is not true for Android. I am using PWA's with Brave (the PWA does get a tiny brave-icon badge overlaid on the corner of the app icon).

That's a nifty workaround but not ideal, since it's not possible to actually provide all WebExtension APIs that way.

That sounds a bit like "Apple is beyond the law/regulations, regulators better accept that and move on" – is that what you mean?

It worked just fine for USB-C, fwiw.

In this case, they could just remove entire features and have the public do their lobbying for them.

To make matters worse, the executive is given powers to tell Apple what exactly they need do to comply if they start funny business.

No back channeling is required. It's literally written in the law that you can go ahead and ask if you're unsure: https://ia.net/topics/unraveling-the-digital-markets-act Scroll to Law: Ask us if you find issues

The section they’re referring to is clause 64 in the lead of the DMA[0] and it is not only limited to cases of interoperability, unlike what iA implies it doesn’t follow with a suggestion that gatekeepers can just ask if they’re unsure. Instead it states:

> In all cases, the gatekeeper and the requesting provider should ensure that interoperability does not undermine a high level of security and data protection in line with their obligations laid down in this Regulation and applicable Union law, in particular Regulation (EU) 2016/679 and Directive 2002/58/EC. The obligation related to interoperability should be without prejudice to the information and choices to be made available to end users of the number-independent interpersonal communication services of the gatekeeper and the requesting provider under this Regulation and other Union law, in particular Regulation (EU) 2016/679.

That’s why one of the main criticisms of the DMA is that gatekeepers generally can’t present proposals for approval and have to wait until after implementing to see if it is to the EC’s liking.

That said, the EU has inquired about the PWA stuff[1] and it seems that the outcome of that has been that Home Screen install doesn’t need to be provided for other browsers. Allowing Apple to back down from their careful interpretation.

0: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...

1: https://9to5mac.com/2024/02/26/apple-blocking-web-apps/

65: For anything more complex we can have an extended dialog

So it's only about a very thin slice of the DMA to start with, and a slice that's not the part that Apple was intending to violate when removing PWAs, but it's also not a process that Apple could trigger or even be a party of.

As far as I know, nothing in the regulation suggests that gatekeepers can get their compliance plans pre-approved or pre-rejected.

That's the beauty of reading: you can read more than just the quote, and read the paragraph immediately after. Or the referenced section in the law: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39565987

It's certain that Apple does not have any kind of back channel approval for keeping PWAs Safari-only. That is not a possibility within the regulatory framework.

The PWA issue is a completely different one.

Although what I assume is they floated removing PWAs to see if that would get users / communities on their side.

It might have worked if PWA support was first class rather than half abandoned.

Removing PWA support goes against both these obligations.

Apple knows exactly what the DMA wants from them, they're just deathly terrified of handing it over.

(Just because newer iOS devices have a USB-C port doesn't mean that all USB-C devices will work with them! Devices still require drivers; if iOS doesn't know how to handle a device, it won't work.)

Apple could fully comply with the letter and spirit of the DMA and remain profitable in the EU, but they would be less profitable. They probably have a very good estimate of how much less profitable, and they're doing their best to minimize the impact.

The idea that you would be forced to give it away for nothing would be a pretty extraordinary and unworkable intervention in the market.

So at some point you have to interact with Apple SDKs.

In almost every other case application software is not considered to be a derivative work of the operating system it runs on. If this wasn't the case, then Apple could have easily sued Cydia and AltStore for offering the equivalent of iOS fanfiction. Hell, even the Copyright Office was perfectly fine with adding a DMCA 1201 exemption for jailbreaking iPhones to install non-Apple software on them - and they're extremely tightfisted with those.

The reasons why this is different is very simple: you don't distribute Apple's SDK along with your application, but you do distribute Unreal's. The user got access to Apple's code when they bought their iPhone, you have to give them Unreal Engine, so you need a license for that.

1 million downloads for an app sounds like a lot for a paid app.

But on the desktop, popular OSS software packages do those kind of numbers in well under a year. There's no reason to believe OSS mobile apps on iPhone would be any different.

Also I never needed to wait for a carrier to approve an Update for my Android Phone. Neither for my Pixel, Nexus or Samsung Galaxy ones.

And beside the "strict" controls, malicious Apps got in the App Store, and the iPhones themselves also pwned.

Are there other Apple Fanboy Horror Stories about Android that you've missed?

Does 20.1 percent market share constitute a monopoly?(2023 Forbes) Seems like people have plenty of choices of what kind of cell phone to purchase.

>treat their every action with scrutiny

Is that not what the free market does? When companies make poor choices customers punish them. (Budweiser 2023)

Depends how it's used. Wabash v. Illinois set the precedent that a far-minority can be a monopoly if they block a government-designated common carrier. Europe's DMA doesn't even mention monopolies at all, and instead sets a new compliance bar for large tech-related companies. Japan's legislation is headed in the same direction.

Seems entirely feasible to me that the App Store or Safari policies could be seen as obstruction of a common service. Apple's de-facto tax hasn't been explicitly blocked in the US yet, but it also has never been explicitly sanctioned. Without guidelines like the DMA in place, Apple is flying blind against US regulators. Microsoft got trapped deep in that hall of mirrors, and nearly paid the ultimate price.

> Is that not what the free market does?

The free market is supplanted by a government that ensures that only a non-lethal portion of rat feces is processed into your container of SPAM or McDonalds meal. They prevent you from exposure to what businesses call, "profit maximization".

If you have a good government, they treat you a little better. They punish the companies that violate consumer rights and scrutinize anticompetitive behavior when it shows up. The free market chooses between regulated competitors; if you think that's unfair, you can move to a country without the rat-feces regulators and see how your breakfast tastes over there. Then we can all be happy.

> When companies make poor choices customers punish them. (Budweiser 2023)

Your evidence is proof to the contrary of your claim. Budweiser wasn't "punished" for making an anticompetitive move, they were boycott because insecure Budweiser customers had a slow news cycle. If Apple had customers protesting for the same reasons, they'd never even know.

"Poor choices" notwithstanding, Apple customers couldn't be assed if they were angry. Suicide nets go up at Foxconn and the harshest words HN or MacRumors can muster is 'poor choice of manufacturing partner'. Conscientious startups and their Macbooks, nary separated any easier than protesting trailer parks and Budweiser.

If there's a good reason iOS can't run third-party software, now's the time to fix it. Otherwise, Apple might have to find a new economic zone to invest in.

Except this never happened.

And it doesn't even make any sense because MFi is when there is proprietary Apple technology involved which isn't the case for USB-C nor 3.5mm, Bluetooth etc.

https://mfi.apple.com/en/faqs

That said, I literally did a jump for joy when the DMA news broke. (Then of course, I did scream bloody murder reading the details on PWAs.)

From [0]:

> “This support means Home Screen web apps continue to be built directly on WebKit and its security architecture, and align with the security and privacy model for native apps on iOS,” Apple explains today.

[0] https://9to5mac.com/2024/03/01/apple-home-screen-web-apps-io...

But I'm not so sure. I certainly don't hope so.

The EU isn't stupid. They very much capable enough to see Apple's shenanigans for what they are.

(I've seen a couple of those comments go around here on HN)

I don't think so. Nowhere in Apple's announcement does it say "the EU is okay with this".

What Apple has announced today is a(n update to their) plan to comply with the DMA. The EU won't actually do anything until March 7th (the deadline for compliance). The fact that they did do something following Apple's announcements regarding PWAs just shows how obviously ludicrous those plans were. The EU recognized the urgency of the situation and acted [1] - If Apple would have shipped this update, many existing PWAs would stop working overnight, those apps would jump ship and offer their PWA in the App Store with (no way back?) and the damage to the reputation of PWAs would have been done: Apple would've sent a message that you can not rely on the web to reach your customers on iOS.

Nowhere does anyone say that the EU is OK with PWAs being restricted to WebKit. In fact, the DMA demands the opposite: Apple has to open up iOS to 3rd party browsers, and Apple can't self-preference Safari/WebKit for any of its features. Like, say, run PWAs.

I have read lots of comments and posts that said something along the lines of "Apple doesn't want other browsers to run Service Workers". That's not the reason for the attempt to remove PWAs on iOS. Service Workers are not PWA-only, every regular website in a browser tab can have a Service Worker. PWAs can be added to the home screen just fine without one. They are not mutually exclusive.

Apple removed PWA support so they would not have to open up the APIs to other browsers. Period.

So, to circle back to "the EU is okay with PWAs being restricted to Safari/Webkit":

I very much doubt it. Apple has announced a plan to comply, forgot to mention they were going to kill support for PWAs, then did confirm it (only took them 2 weeks), and now they backed down. We're back where we left off a month ago - and I believe the EU is very much going to have an opinion on the WebKit restriction Apple is trying to keep in place.

[1] The EU only announced they would start an investigation AFAIK, which is a long way from actually enforcing anything.

It's the kind of reactivity that might have surprised Apple, as it was a public response released even before the official answer to the current obviously malicious DMA compliance plan.

The only thing we know for certain is Apple has shown no interest in making the best user experience given the rules vs complying with the rules only where required to.

Added from Chrome? Runs in Chrome.

Added from Safari? Runs in WebKit.

etc.

Why the drama?

Besides, shouldn't it be up to the browser engine to decide on sandboxing between PWAs?

The important part for Apple should be that the browser engine itself is sandboxed from the rest of the OS.

They are not opening PWA's to other browser engines.

The device, OS, and apps are also not any better, IMO.

Not coming down on either side, just pointing out the argument exists for both.

Still, you need to use both to see if you like one better so, do it.

It was either this, or having to explain EU why PWAs work just fine on Android and Windows, and not on iDevices.

Apple can't keep hiding behind the "it's for your own safety", because everything they argue about happens on MacOS already.

A modern smartphone is a capable computer, yet I still feel like I'm carrying an expensive brick in my pocket.

Or are you saying that people can't have that so they love their iPhones and are unhappy about their MacBooks?

(not that I’ve ever had a virus on a mac)

Ideally, of course, Apple would allow PWAs to use different browser engines and then competing browsers could add support for extensions in PWAs.

Apple will give per-app prompts for system resources like location, but does not really have an iOS 'app prompts for permission to manipulate another app'.

These sorts of permissions are confusing to users, they imply an execution model where both apps will be guaranteed to be runnable side-by-side (rather than one suspended while the other executes), and provide efficient vectors to share privacy/tracking information across those boundaries about the user.

Extensions can in principle do anything the browser can, like snoop on traffic with foreign sites, etc... They have more capability (for good reason!), but require some level of authorization to happen by the user and (usually) OS vendor to make sure nothing bad happens. And bad things happen anyway.

Apologies but it had to be said.

If this sort of behavior doesn't ring alarm bells in the minds of the regulators I don't know what will.

My hunch is that the initial change may have been performative, but it was likely performative for the EU regulators and not the customers. This pivot presumably means that the EU has now okayed browser engine lock in for PWAs.

Funny I was thinking the exact opposite: they floated it in case PWA removal got people to complain about the EU.

In a few months, once we see newer browser engines on iOS, we will see calls that it is unfair Apple allows for one kind of web apps (on their own browser engine) but not others and that is self-preferencing.

It seems like an argument against what Apple is claiming.

iOS is more like 50 to 55% market share so the goal is more to filter out bad actors and keep a high standard. Also let's milk that cash-cow.

I'm not necessarily agreeing with this approach but I got to admit it makes sense.

And they still must pay the 100$ annually to sign and notarize.

The consumer would switch their PWA default engine in one of the half dozen "you have to agree to continue" buttons when Edge and Chrome install themselves and demand every privacy and security toggle be turned off (as Microsoft Teams demands when you try to run it in Safari*), and then all PWAs would be insecure and monitored by the adtech engines.

This weird idea to force Apple to have OS viewports use a foreign engine would not be 99.9% of users' real choice at all, just like the users who installed Avast anti-virus didn't choose to have all their browsing sold to adtech, or the users who chose "Private Browsing" in Chrome didn't choose to have Google recording that activity to the user's profile.

* Note: Because Teams is actually "just" a skin on many different services and the Apple+CloudFlare private browsing confuse the coupling.

I suggest Apple takes inspiration from Android then, since that doesn't happen on Android. Maybe Android's security model is better.

That is not what people are saying. Nobody cares that MacOS renders half its content using WebKit on Mac. Same goes for iOS - people do care that they can't use a PWA in their browser of choice. It's anticompetitive blockage that will be inevitably brought-up when the compliance deadline rolls around.

> would not be 99.9% of users' real choice at all

No reasonable person can claim that. Alternative browser engines aren't even allowed yet, you don't know that.

> just like the users who installed Avast anti-virus didn't choose to have all their browsing sold to adtech, or the users who chose "Private Browsing" in Chrome didn't choose to have Google recording that activity to the user's profile.

Or the people who left notifications on and got their iPhone information slurped up by the NSA. Pobody's nerfect, right? Get the strawmen out of here before they start a fire.

The EU stated they will investigate this. And somehow Apple decides less than a week later that the feature will return.

Looks like regulators should not be worried about Apple complying in the medium term.

DMA has a catch-all: any circumvention can lead to penalties. You can try to play games like this, but it will just lead to fines.

I would expect a few more U-turns, especially on the fee structure.

The DMA isn’t an exact set of steps to follow. A lot is left to interpretation

Examples include portions of AirPrint functionality on macOS, Bootcamp suspend/resume, and FaceTime peer-to-peer. The latter being the reason that Apple did not open up FaceTime as a broader industry initiative.

In the US we currently have Apple Watch being sold without access to the blood oxygen feature due to an import restriction.

There are also restrictions on showing certain maps in certain countries, as well as whether or not the Taiwan flag emoji displays in China.

Very often legal requirements lead to removal of features that cannot easily comply rather than expansion of the feature to comply. Removal is less rick.

Ultimately, the truth is that a company like Apple doesn't want to deal with DMA. Their whole services business model (whether it be the App Store monopoly or the iMessage monopoly) relies on behavior that is counter to DMA.

It's also clear from their seething press releases about the DMA that they don't want to mince words about how much they don't like it or don't want to do it.

It's always easy for them to give a vague privacy / security argument to justify whatever benefits their monopolistic control. It's no different from the "Think of the children!" style of reasoning that politicians use to get what they want.

I think it's important for users to keep calling them out at every opportunity so they don't get away with it.