We do talk to the browser vendors. The bundle ID one by itself ensures it's unviable project. That's why 15 months in, there are no alternative browser engines in the EU.
Thanks so much! it’s been a four-year journey just to get this far, and none of it would have been possible without the volunteers who donate their time just for the belief in a better future for the web! Will be passing this comment on!
1. If you use either "Safari" or "Chrome" on iOS, then Apple gets paid. That's 97% of the market on iOS.
2. Many of those games could be rewritten in WebGPU/WebGL2.. if it saved them 30% appstore tax, and the install process was decent and they had frictionless payments, they'd move.
3. Because Apple is the primary target market, and if you've already built native for iOS, what's the advantage of doing web for Android if your not making the cost savings of only having to build one app. 70% of Desktop usage is now the web/web apps... that tells you what's possible if browsers can compete.
That’s not true. Apple only gets paid for search going through Safari to Google.
If the game makers are do interested in saving the 30% tax, then why aren’t they making the games web based for Android? Gabe makers want the easy in app purchases and getting kids who while they don’t have credit cards on their phones, do have access to buy content in apps with parental controls.
How is iOS the primary market when 70% of mobile phones both worldwide and in the EU are on Android?
If they already have a web app for PCs, then why do they need to make an Android app too if web apps are so great on Android?
And if the web makes such a good platform for games, then why aren’t there more great games on the web that would run on PCs and Android unmodified?
And it can’t just be the woefully insufficient TestFlight 10k users because there are possible upwards of a million developers who need to test their websites/web apps in the EU.
Install and discoverability is still hidden. Push is gated behind install. Safari’s scroll bugs haven’t been fixed despite us extensively documenting them, emailing to Safari’s leadership and raising them every year as the number one bug.
The number one thing we’ve asked for is third party browser engines on iOS.
Author here, this was supposed to be when the user installs a new browser it has the option to call an OS api to ask the user if they would like to set the newly installed browser as the default.
This could have reasonable anti-spam protections built in. We’re planning on expanding this in more detail.
“Act like apps” is far too nebulous and obscures what we are actually talking about. Let’s see what we can agree on. How about these two statements:
1. The only web apps that can possibly be affected at all by this change are ones that are installed to the home screen and used in that way.
2. It is not possible for web apps that are currently used in a browser to be affected by this change.
I don’t think you can disagree with these two statements can you? So how can you make the claim that Apple are going to break all web apps?
Or are you explicitly denying that a “web app” is something you can use in a web browser, and you define it only as something that must be installed to the home screen to work?
Are you on 17.4 beta 2? If so I’ll have more questions.
People have been saying it's working for them in the EU: the Apple's detection is complex and seem to take into account different parameters, like the ios region, but also the origin country of the sim card used.
But note this behavior only occurs if you are in the EU and you are using 17.4 beta 1 or beta 2
