zlacker

> It's not that they're one judgment away from that day. They know that. It's just that they want to get as much mileage as they can before they too abandon Safari and first allow, then switch to Chromium. That will happen in the next 5 years.

I'm not a great future-reader myself, but I don't see this happening soon. The web is a great threat to their app (and also subscription) revenue stream, and they have a lot to lose with little to win for their platform. They lag behind because they want to, not because they can't.

>>leonon+(OP)
> The web is a great threat to their app (and also subscription) revenue stream

This is as ridiculous today as it has been every year since the iPhone began.

Mobile web apps are terrible and despite all the years of promises that "feature X" will fix this nothing has changed. And you can't blame Apple because Google et al could easily have made mobile web apps work on Android.

If you want to make a mobile web app then go right ahead. Apple isn't stopping you. But just don't be surprised when no user is interested in it.

>>threes+H6
You do realize web apps can be packaged up and distributed on the Play Store and work just like regular apps on Android, and so YouTube Music among others are already web apps. Pretending like no one is interested when we're talking about probably close to 100 million users or more for a single web app is disingenuous. Apple is a walled garden and their cultist will make up any excuse to not have to admit so.

>>encryp+N8
Web apps can be packaged up and distributed on App Store as well.

People tried it with PhoneGap for years and it failed. I even built some of them.

It has nothing to do with Apple and everything to do with the experience being objectively terrible.

So bad in fact that even Google gave up trying and built Flutter.

>>threes+ma
https://blog.pwabuilder.com/posts/publish-your-pwa-to-the-io...

> While WebKit is making progress on PWA support, at the time of this writing, PWAs remain a second-class citizen on iOS. The iOS App Store’s support for PWAs is non-existent, requiring a web view-based solution like PWABuilder’s.

> Additionally, because iOS doesn’t allow 3rd party browser engines, your PWA is limited to WebKit’s PWA capabilities, which are currently lagging behind other browser engines.

Google isn't abandoning PWAs, and in fact Chromium continues expanding support to make them as native as possible:

https://web.dev/window-controls-overlay/

Might I also add that the web app manifest is also an open standard, that Safari is lacking on:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Manifest

https://w3c.github.io/manifest/

>>encryp+Rb
I can take a mobile web site, wrap it in a browser component and publish it to the App Store. Now I will lose one of the advantages of PWA e.g. remote updates but everything else I can do e.g. push notifications, access device APIs.

This has been available for close to a decade.

Guess what. Users hate it. They hate mobile web apps and their slow, clunky, feature-poor, non-native interfaces and for that reason they will also hate PWAs.

>>threes+md
Does this argument matter to the question of Apple allowing Chromium?

>>encryp+N8
I don't think anyone argues that developers and companies don't want to make web apps. Clearly, many of them are interested in that.

>>threes+md
I think you're ignoring the fact that App Store didn't allow PWAs until fairly recently, among a bunch of other things. Mobile web apps aren't slow or clunky or feature-poor and you can design your interface however you want now... except on Apple products. It sounds like your issue is the poor support from Apple, which is exactly what I was getting at. I'd encourage you to read through the blog post I linked here:

https://blog.pwabuilder.com/posts/publish-your-pwa-to-the-io...

> PWAs remain a second-class citizen on iOS

> PWABuilder doesn’t guarantee that your app will be accepted into Apple’s App Store.

> In 2019, Apple released new guidelines for HTML5 apps in the App Store

2019 isn't close to a decade.