Apple declined to implement 16 Web APIs in Safari due to privacy concerns

There may be some legitimate fingerprinting concenrs. But given the list of API's it's hard not to see this as Apple crippling PWAs to prevent them from replacing native iOS apps (and hurting Apple's revenue from the Apple tax).

And maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't the fingerprinting concern be mitigated by the fact the app has to ask for permission before using the API? If an app that doesn't have to do with MIDI asks for permission to use my MIDI device, I'm going to be instantly suspicious.

Exactly. This is about making sure web apps are not as powerful as native apps.

One thing is the revenue generated by the App Store but suppose JavaScript web apps were just as powerful and well integrated as native apps; then why use native apps at all? Why have an App Store at all? Why have a Mac or an iPhone if any device with a modern web browser would do?

When Huawei tried to create their alternative to Android. The big thing missing wasn't the hardware or the operation system. It was the App Store with your map app, your banking app, your scooter app and so on.

The App Store and the proprietary development platforms for Android and Apple has become a way to keep their duopoly in place.

Almost certainly an excuse to further suppress PWAs.

Are you all serious about this ask for permission thing? Good luck explaining MIDI, HID, NFC and so on to the average Joe, in a small popup. We already have enough “I agree” buttons popping over the screen. Web should be built for everybody, it’s not the nineties anymore.

> If an app that doesn't have to do with MIDI asks for permission to use my MIDI device, I'm going to be instantly suspicious.

Sure, you'll be suspicious, but I seriously doubt you're the average user. I bet a very large proportion of Safari users have no idea what a MIDI device is and some significant portion of them wouldn't think twice about granting those permissions.

Yep, seems like apple made another move against the web.

Despite this, I believe PWAs will eventually win, and Apple will be forced to comply if they wish to stay relevant.

Their browser share dropped a little recently (https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share). If that continues, it'll certainly irk them!

Consider that browser share usage could shift around as device usage shifts around during a pandemic.

I'd assume the small percentage with a midi device who are going to music app websites would be more likely to know

Isn't Google the one implementing all these APIs though?

Anyone can request MIDI permissions.

The parent comment implies a bad actor using the API for something like fingerprinting, and a common user who may have never even heard of MIDI, let alone have a device.

But for google, the benefits of having richer web apps on which they can show you ads and have app developers pay google for ads may be more valuable than any revenue they lose from the app store.

I don’t even want these 16 api’s. I want a way to do notifications and a way to store more than 50 mb on ios. Sure, make me and the user jump through hoops to make sure I’m not abusive, but with those two there are a ton of apps which I can build as pwa’s.

The app clips feature they showed? That should have been a qr code triggered pwa with notifications, except everybody had to build it as an app because they couldn’t do notifications, and then apple used the cumbersome nature of those apps as the reason for app clips. It’s the snake eating its own tail, and I’m getting IE6 vibes because microsoft also strategically stopped improving IE for web apps because they wanted to push app developers to native because of the improved user experience. Yeah, the web is worse, but worse is better.

I’m very glad a web page cannot store 50mb data and send notification to me.

You only think from a developer’s perspective. What if you are the user receiving 50 notification requirement a day from a web browser?

I don't disagree, but would you expect such a significant drop in Safari usage?

Sure, but Apple could solve that by requiring a user action to show that popup dialog. Or they could even block everything by default and force you to give permissions manually. That way average Joe is blisfully unaware of anything and completely safe while you just have to suffer a minor inconvenience of whitelisting that one legit website the first time you use it.

Do you honestly think that Apple would lose enough money by implementing Web MIDI for Safari on iOS that this would be even the most remote consideration? Like, the Safari team was in a meeting about Web MIDI and some manager said "but think of the impact on our stock options!" and they all went "oooooh" and scrapped it?

Or is it that Tim Cook was looking at Apple's balance sheet and decided that they couldn't afford to lose the 30% cut of all the MIDI-capable iOS/iPadOS apps that could be completely replaced by a web app?

The reality is that the real cost of this feature to them would be developer time; it would be a colossal waste of their limited WebKit/Safari developer resources to implement Web MIDI rather than something that would actually be used by more than a scant sliver of a percentage of Safari users.

Then you tap on the notification and say "turn off" and then it stops happening.

PWA's have always lagged behind Native Capabilities, even when API's exist the performance has been poor for high performance apps so the allegation doesn't quite make sense to me.

What if you are a user receiving 50 notifications a day from an app? You block them. Same with the web app.

People have very strict mental models of what “the web” and “native” should do but they’re not actually based on anything. There’s no actual reason why a web app sending you notifications (which it has to prompt for permission to do) is different to an app doing it. From the non developer perspective the divide makes no sense.

Not to mention the privacy argument by Apple feels disingenuous. The reason people are so outraged by tracking on the web is because they know it’s happening. Meanwhile native apps include bundles from Facebook to implement sign in with Facebook and it does whatever it wants. But because you can’t inspect and check no one talks about it.

It’s possible if people are using company-provided devices at home in lieu of their own, and the company is providing Windows devices while theirs were Apple. I don’t know the likelihood of this explanation, though.

Apple is a corporation listed on a US exchange, an entity where the only motivation is to generate profit for shareholders. It helps for corporations to frame business decisions in moral terms. If Apple cares about privacy, it is only because there is alignment with profit. If Apple cares about locking out APIs that disrupt their App Store profit, it doesn't hurt to frame the decision in privacy terms.

Currently my desire for both privacy, convenience, and usability align with Apple's current business decisions, so I choose iPhone. When Apple pivots to a new business model, I'll find the best compromise product.

I don't want that notification.

This isn’t able notifications, this is about the “do you want to allow notifications” prompts. Crazy how in the same HN community you have people on one post complaining that there are too damn many cookie/gdpr/etc prompts, then on the next post asking for additional notification prompts. What ever happened to going to a website and consuming its content and leaving?

I get that making an app instead of a PWA is a pain the in the ass, but the reason I pay $$$ to Apple is so that pains like that exist in the developer’s ass instead of mine. I want to be in their walled garden and I want them to keep lazy developers and poor UX out.

I wished they implemented the Fullscreen API for iPhones...

Sorry, but Average Joe needs to learn this one thing to adapt to the modern web:

Say no.

Average Joe doesn't need to learn what all these things are. In the unlikely event he knows what the thing is and knows that he wants it, he can answer yes. But his default response needs to be no.

>Web should be built for everybody

Exactly. That's why Average Joe needs to adapt.

I like having apps that work and feel the same. I can bring my knowledge from one app to another. I can develop expertise on a platform. The web is culturally unable to do that.

Look at a sophisticated web app, like Google Docs. This has a menu bar, which is a bad copy of the native Mac menu bar. Web apps are copying native app conventions, to try to be more familiar. But they're also eroding those conventions.

Eventually only click and swipe will be left. And this problem is not going to be solved by Web MIDI or whatever.

I would personally think this is unlikely. Looking at https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-version-market-share we can see that Safari on iPhone probably caused the overall drop.

Now, I can't see people suddenly not using their iPhone because of the pandemic (quite the contrary actually) - perhaps this signifies a slowdown in iPhone sales?

I think you’re trying to say that Mac OS or Windows native apps have pretty much the same UI/UX conventions which makes it easy to use any app on that platform. And that Web Apps have UI/UX that is less consistent than apps across OS’s.

I can’t say I agree with this. There are a ton of MacOs apps that implement fully custom GUI (first one that comes to mind is Jira native Mac app which looks nothing like a Mac app I’ve seen before)

I agree web apps are likely eroding OS conventions though. The Jira app is an example of that (they decided to make their native app look and behave the same as the Jira Web App instead of using standard MacOS GUI conventions.

It’s a tough trade off.

Every time I see this argument I have the same question. How many successful web apps are there for Android? Apps that make the most money on the App Store are free to play games with in app purchases of loot boxe, coins, etc. how many of those are feasible on the web?

On the other hand, which apps that make money via in app purchases would be viable and successful as web apps?

Yeah and Spotify is another one. Electron is clearly at work here, probably in your Jira example too.

These apps are frustrating for someone accustomed to the Mac UI. Basic interactions (like context menus) don't work at all, or work in unexpected ways. I have no idea what these apps can do because they all have a unique UI vocabulary. So I don't try.

I think Apple has really dropped the ball on this. They ought to have spotted and embraced the web's great strengths early. Ephemeral, zero-install apps, using native components - that's the platform I want. Though I understand how others may disagree.

Speaking as a Xoogler, there's no coordination between the teams building Chrome APIs and those working on Android. Leadership is content to see what sticks (and they may be right).

I think most would be as successful IF they had an equally frictionless payment system. Big hits like Candy Crush could easily be built as a web app. These are not pushing the boundaries of software, they're just exploiting our psychology.

I disagree strongly. Apple leaves money on the table by not aggressively tracking its users. And their investment in e.g. accessibility is certainly not driven by bottom-line considerations.

Apple is relevant today because they actually are focused on products, not profits. Sometimes it really is that simple.

If PWA support is so good on Android, there should be a lot of successful profitable PWA’s on Android. Chrome supports the Web Payments API that should make payments seamless in the browser.

I have removed all my e-commerce apps and use on web versions of those on my phones (Flipkart agrees - https://www.pwastats.com/2017/08/flipkart/ ). I saw my parents doing the same when they uninstalled a bunch of apps like FB & Pinterest and started using the web versions instead to save space and don't seem to have any negative experience.

IMO, that won't happen until either Apple gives up their control on browser "engine" choices on iOS or Apple itself becomes irrelevant.

Android supports PWA and let's you install apps without their app store, not the same as apple at all

apple fanboys will accept anything from apple. No headphone jack? it's an improvement! w3 spec not implemented? they are working on more important features! antenna stops working if you hold the phone wrong? I like it that way!

Which still doesn’t support the argument that Apple wants to cripple PWAs because it makes money on the App Store. Those apps would have been free on the App Store and since they are selling physical goods, Apple wouldn’t have made any money on in app purchases.

It's naive to think any company exists for any other purpose than maximizing profit. That's business 101.

> Whatever happened to going to a website and consuming it's content and leaving?

The internet became more powerful so it does more things. The PWA spec allows for zero-install apps that are just as performant (or more) than native apps. You can view their network requests in the console, and they run in a sandboxed environment. You want to download and install a binary for something that can be accomplished in a few kb of cached JavaScript?

counterpoint to that argument: if you want to create an app that runs on both Apple and Android products, and you know that Apple doesn't support the progressive web app specification, why would you waste your time? It makes more sense to use a cross-platform development tool and release on the app store when one of the two big software platforms doesn't support the spec.

I don’t want any websites sending me any notifications ever.

I don’t want any websites triggering the browser to ask me if they can send me notifications.

I don’t want any websites asking me if they can ask the browser to ask me to send me notifications.

I don’t want any websites using their classic scams like tiny “x” buttons that have insufficient contrast and are impossible to click on a mobile device anyways to ask me if they can ask the browser to send me notifications.

I don’t want to see my grandma dealing with scammers who trick her into allowing potentially phicious notifications that she doesn’t know how to cancel, or even what the source is.

I want developers to jump through as many bullshit hoops as possible before even having the chance to send me notifications. Apple and their review prices help me out there, and for all above points.

It seems to me like you believe everyone is the same as you: they value small package size, they personally audit all code they run, they want random corporations to have an easier time getting a presence on their home screen, and they’d be able to easily identify and stop all corporate badgering they do end up receiving. I don’t think any of those are true even for me (someone in the industry), let alone the population at large.

No. This is about privacy.

Why have native apps at all?

Because web apps are crap, excuse my Swahili.

> I don’t want any websites sending me any notifications ever.

> I don’t want any websites triggering the browser to ask me if they can send me notifications

That’s fine for you but some of us who are in niche communities or have weird applications don’t want to wait for a VC to fund the development of a native app.

Right now I can’t get notifications from IRC at all which pushes me and everyone else to centralized chat services. This has distorted the evolution of the internet and I would argue has contributed heavily to the “fake news” problem.

> It seems to me like you believe everyone is the same as you

You’re projecting. We want a feature that the user can disable, not ever being able to use this at all means everyone has to want the same things you do.

I mean it gives credit to the theory that webapps (PWAs in particular) are gaining tractions and big companies are paying attention to it because people are actually using it, which means Apple is afraid it might loose it's stranglehold on the app economy.

But the implication of this argument is that the benefit of PWAs is to the developer rather than the user, right? If PWAs actually benefited users, then creating one instead of an Android app wouldn’t be waste of time even if you had to create a separate iOS native app in either case.

I clearly outline how “a feature the user can disable” is the same as “a gdpr/cookie/telemetry/etc prompt the user can reject”

It doesn’t take a VC to make an app, I made some starting in HS (with push, yes), and you can too. Be the change you wish to see.

PWA support is still pretty new. It will take some time before we see a lot of really successful PWA deployments.

> I don’t want any websites sending me any notifications ever.

I agree with you actually, but not everybody does. Some people do want push notifications when they get a new email or Facebook update. I wish it weren't so, but it is.

> I don’t want any websites triggering the browser to ask me if they can send me notifications.

> I don’t want any websites asking me if they can ask the browser to ask me to send me notifications.

> I don’t want any websites using their classic scams like tiny “x” buttons...

Given that we live in a world where there are notifications, you have the choice to disable them on your device, or decline them on a site by site basis. For your grandma, I'd suggest the former strategy.

But if you don't want the site to ask you, and you don't want the browser to ask you, and you don't want to disable them for all sites, you're setting yourself up for disappointment. All the whining isn't going to bring back 90s internet.

> It seems to me like you believe everyone is the same as you: they value small package size, they personally audit all code they run, they want random corporations to have an easier time getting a presence on their home screen, and they’d be able to easily identify and stop all corporate badgering they do end up receiving

What's the difference between a native app asking to send you notifications vs a web app?

None of us like the crazy number of prompts.

Most (all?) of us like to be the one who controls what we can do with our own devices.

These standards return some control to the user, rather than the corporation.

But then we get more prompts! Well, not necessarily. The user could choose to have all prompts automatically rejected, and only opt-in when they desired. This would not create more information for trackers to track, because Apple could make it the default for all of their devices.

This seems to solve the problem: People who want the features can have them, and the people who don't want them can ignore them without interruption.

This is where our problem with Apple is: there are solutions to be found but rather than solve them, Apple hides behind lies in order to protect their bottom line while harming many users and the internet as a whole.

The types of apps that are theoretically “moving to the web” aren’t making Apple any money anyway. There is no evidence that there is a trend for the types of apps that actually benefit from in app purchases are moving to the web.

All of the APIs that Apple isn’t supporting wouldn’t help a single major revenue producing app move to the browser.

Any app that you wrote would also have a web equivalent any way for non mobile environments. So why not just do an iOS app and a web app?

And still waiting for someone to give me an example of an app that makes a lot of money on the App Store through in app purchasing, that could probably make just as much money as a PWA if it weren’t for mobile Safari.

But won't the user then go "why would I allow this website to access something I don't know about?" or, if they clicked yes anyway, the entropy would be ~0 as they have no midi devices.

This is assuming we moved to a model where more permissions had to be requested rather than just allowed

Sure, they are not micromanaging the Chrome APIs or the Android APIs. But the strategic direction is clear: "develop more web APIs and make them useful, so more people stay on the web so we can show more ads."

>I clearly outline how “a feature the user can disable” is the same as “a gdpr/cookie/telemetry/etc prompt the user can reject”

You're clearly wrong then. iOS already does something similar with location and doesn't suffer from this problem.

>It doesn’t take a VC to make an app, I made some starting in HS (with push, yes), and you can too. Be the change you wish to see.

That's actually kind of upsetting. On my other machines I do fix problems. The cost of volunteering to deal with apple's shitty phone is an overpriced machine where even the old used desktops are more expensive than the modern one I just built, the time it takes to learn a new language and an (IMO pretty crap) environment (GUI toolkit not withstanding,) the time it takes to maintain an app for a platform with constant API churn, and $100 a year for a developer license (nope, you can't use push notifications without paying this.)

Here's the change I want to see: people abandoning an abusive company. I'm buying a pinephone so that the next time I have a problem I can deal with it without having to buy the beater car equivalent of a computer (and spending as much.)

No, of course they wouldn't. You or I would, sure, but a regular user is pretty much conditioned to accept whatever to make the page load.

If they don't care about privacy enough to learn about it, that's fair, no point wasting your time to avoid a problem that isn't affecting you much.