> For support, the Progressive Web Apps will still need to be built on WebKit, with all that entails.
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.
> in light of their significant investment in supporting PWAs over the last four years
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.
AFAIK Apple still doesn't support PWAs. As one example AFAIK, iOS Webkit doesn't support fullscreen mode and orientation so it's impossible to make a landscape game as a PWA. That is supported on Android Firefox and Chrome for like 10 years? And would likely be supported on an alternate browser on iOS
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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 stated in their first statement regarding multiple engines support for PWAs, that it can be done, they just decided not to make it. Also, it’s an about 18 months old law. Not that they wouldn’t have time or resources for that matter. So there was clearly a purpose to kill PWAs on iOS, and it was clearly their decision according to them.
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.
If (as many people have suggested) Apple's intention in suddenly devoting significant resources into PWAs (after completely ignoring them for years) was to avoid app store regulation, it makes perfect sense that when they failed to stave off regulation in the EU Apple would no longer have a motivation for investing into them within the EU.
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.
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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?
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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.
Just like Apple's 3-months free trial for the Apple Music service, keeping the Webkit-only PWAs were going to be seen as anticompetitive by Apple's opponents.
Making the change early is a strategy to exploit Apple's opponents into loudly decrying how important and useful PWAs are - and that removing PWAs is the true, evil, anti-competitive strategy. (With all of their typical exaggeration, in reality we know PWAs are a limited-use feature.)
In short, Apple played the useful idiots into being their cheerleaders and provided Apple exactly what they needed to maintain this feature.
It didn't even take an "open letter" from "Taylor Swift" to "Tim Cook" this time.
tl,dr: Apple exploits anti-apple rhetoric to get their way, again.
The histrionical descriptions of other people's takes are like nails on chalkboard and kinda gross. (bloody murder?)
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.
The law requires Apple to open up iOS to 3rd-party browser engines and that Apple can't self-preference their own browser. This would mean that Apple has to open up anything that Safari can do (like run PWAs).
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?
No, DMA wording made it very clear that it's about web browser engine.
> 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.
It’s more subtle than that. If Apple uses WebKit within one of their built-in apps or OS components, let’s say in their Weather app or some Apple Pay dialog, there surely is no requirement that this has to be replaceable by Chromium or Gecko. Similarly, the PWA runtime environment may not necessarily count as a “web browser engine”, since they aren’t used to browse the web. It remains to be seen how this will be judged by the EU institutions.
You’re misreading pretty much everything you’ve quoted from the DMA.
> 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?
The final authority lies with the courts. If any of the third-party browser providers sue for being disadvantaged by PWAs being restricted to WebKit, no previous “back-channeling” with the Commission will have any bearing on the judgment. And the Commission knows this, so is unlikely to engage in that manner.
Setting the agenda matters. This drama probably made more people and businesses aware of the DMA and may influence the focus of some participants. For example, there's an "Apple DMA compliance workshop" in two weeks, to which interested stakeholders can register:
https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/events-poolpage/app...
What you said is true but not to the extent that you might think if you are used to the legal systems of countries like the USA or UK.
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
Apple provided theirs reasoning on this (security issues due to how iOS is currently written...) when they initially stated they would be removing them and said the work was'nt worth the tiny base of users who use it.
Only technical reasons. When PWA’s were introduced in iOS 11, they were built with the assumption of WebKit as a privileged process. A re-arch is definitely doable, just a big expense for little return. And probably not feasible in just a year, can’t imagine it would be a top priority against all of the other work.
They were basically negotiating in public. I think the EC probably realized that the DMA as currently written is flawed and producing outcomes they don't want, and this episode basically highlighted it to them. They probably told Apple there won't be any enforcement against only Safari having it, because the alternative is worse. A basic principle is that you are very unlikely to compel Apple to engineer anything unless they choose to, and you would most likely lose in the EU courts if you tried to. Any regulation that doesn't factor that in is going to be doomed to fail.
> A basic principle is that you are very unlikely to compel Apple to engineer anything unless they choose to, and you would most likely lose in the EU courts if you tried to. Any regulation that doesn't factor that in is going to be doomed to fail.
That sounds a bit like "Apple is beyond the law/regulations, regulators better accept that and move on" – is that what you mean?
Companies are compelled to develop features all the time. Mostly so far in the EU these features have been around accessibility, safety, and crime prevention, but there’s an awful lot of precedent for companies being required to develop something specific in order to be able to sell their product in the EU.
I think nobody in the EU can make such assurances. It's a law, and courts will decide if apple is following them.
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 means that all Home Screen web apps will still be powered by WebKit, regardless of whether the web app is added using Safari or not – exactly as it works today and has for years.
I doubt there was back-channeling - Apple is seeing how liberally they can interpret this act. They tried doing the same thing when they threatened to use MFi on USB-C, up until an EU Comissioner threatened to boot them from the market. Plus, making per-company agreements would kinda render the entire "point" of the Digital Market Act moot.
Apple knows exactly what the DMA wants from them, they're just deathly terrified of handing it over.
There is no evidence that Apple ever planned to introduce a MFi system with USB-C. What likely happened is that leakers misinterpreted the USB-C E-Marker as a MFi chip.
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.
> when they threatened to use MFi on USB-C, up until an EU Comissioner threatened to boot them from the market
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.
Nope, that’s not what iA says, and it would be a gross misrepresentation of the DMA to be honest.
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.
That's not true. The section the blog post is quoting is saying that the EC can ask another regulatory body to make a decision specifically on whether the technical implementation of interoperability requirements is sufficient.
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.
Apple didn't have to ask though, they fully knew they were breaking the law here. They are only backing down because of the pressure from the web community and from the DMA team starting an investigation.
Firefox still supports them on Android, and macOS just introduced them (last year IIRC). In other words, every major OS has at least one implementation!
Devil's advocate: having a stable (maybe too stable) runtime for all iOS PWAs might actually be a benefit. Native apps, for instance, don't have to worry about rendering issues in various "viewers." This actually brings PWAs closer to the world of native apps, which I believe is what users would prefer.
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.)
I'm not sure who backed off here, Apple or DMA officials. Apple's argument was that they wouldn't be able to enforce some privacy and security restrictions, if PWAs were running on a third-party browser engine. If DMA hadn't required PWAs to run on third-party browser engines, then Apple wouldn't have any concerns in the first place.
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.
Nowhere in Apple's statement or anywhere else does it say that the EU agrees with this. It's just Apple announcing a plan. I can imagine them being like "we showed we'd be willing to kill PWAs entirely, so they surely will be OK with our olive branch here and let us keep our WebKit restriction in place for PWAs"
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 have to imagine Apple is in direct talks with EU regulators and passed this change by them and provided enough reasoning to do so. They might have even gave a concession in some other part of the OS to get this behavior greenlit.
Yes, but they also are smart enough to realize that the public can be swayed by Apple's shenanigans, and that sometimes you have to act low-key to not get the public opinion against you in these turbulent social times.
So glad they reversed that, it would have killed my side-project which I based around webapp push notifications just after they released PWA pushnotifications with iOS 16.4 not even 12 months ago. That backtrack would have been a punch in the face of all devs that jumped on that feature.
I feel like it’s still very useless and they implemented it in a way that makes it practically unusable.
“Apple's iOS has some limitations when it comes to push notifications. For example, iOS devices do not support background sync, which means that PWA push notifications cannot be delivered to the device when the user is not actively using the app. Additionally, iOS devices do not support silent push notifications, which means that notifications cannot be delivered to the device without the user's knowledge.
Another limitation of iOS devices is that PWA push notifications cannot be delivered to the lock screen. Instead, they are delivered to the notification center, which can be accessed by swiping down from the top of the screen. This means that users may see the notification later, which could result in missed messages.”
Apple will maliciously comply until people give up.
Your information regarding push seem outdated - both statements are NOT true. Since iOS 16.4 you can deliver push notifications even when the PWA is not actively in use. You need, however, to have the website added to the home screen (=PWA install in iOS world). I use both features on lockmeout.online - which core functionality is based on delivering push notifications on the lock screen. You need however to give permission/configure lockscreen notifications as with any other (non-PWA) app.
To anyone reading this as "the EU is okay with PWAs being restricted to Safari/Webkit":
(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.
I think this is spot on. It might not seem like much, but the EU announcing they would open an investigation, during the beta of an OS is unheard of.
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.
>Apple would've sent a message that you can not rely on the web to reach your customers on iOS.
I mean, given the rest of their malicious compliance over the paranoia of losing App store power, this seems to align with their goals. The only kink in this armor comes from old history where the Jobs era clearly didn't like the idea of the web on iPhone, but market forces made them add in all sort of specific exceptions and restrictions for browsers at the end of the day.
But that was in the Jobs era, nearly a decade ago. I can see them wanting to slowly try again.
>Apple removed PWA support so they would not have to open up the APIs to other browsers. Period.
All other browsers of... Mozilla? Most other people are perfectly fine staying in webkit land. Even Google probably wouldn't change much if IOS opened up.
Maybe, maybe not. It can also be explained by Apple wanting to do the minimum required. First choice: no PWA support at all, Second choice: PWA support independent of custom browser support, and final choice (most work): PWA support on top of the custom browser support.
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.
That said, I doubt it here. they thought a feature was barely used and got enough flack to realize it may get them in deep wanted with DMA. But we don't know how strict they are with PWAs specifically. They probably backed off to prevent anymore of the various issues they caused themselves over this whole thing.
If so, it’s working. Now all the commenters who assume that Apple is doing the worst thing possible at all times are praising the EU for forcing Apple to save PWAs.
Otherwise they’d be complaining about how Apple was intentionally crippling PWA support by not letting you pick the rendering engine used.
As a fan of PWAs, I like the direction this is headed. Apple will both have to open up PWAs to other browser engines while increasing the abilities of PWAs in Safari. App developers will realize 80% of apps are fine as PWAs and it is a great way to avoid the app store.
For the time being, their excuse of not having enough time to validate and secure those capabilities seems valid. In a year, that won't seem as reasonable, and other browser engines will rightly complain.
Apparently the level of security required for home screen web apps can only be met by Apple. Because nobody else can be trusted to isolate the data of different web apps from each other.
I can tell from the phrasing that you don't agree with Apple on that, but just want to respond anyway. Apple will still be sandboxing the browser engines, so even if Apple doesn't trust the browser vendors, this still isn't a logical argument against allowing them to run PWAs.
Readit News
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'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.
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.
> 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."
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.
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.
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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?
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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.
What is the end result?
Making the change early is a strategy to exploit Apple's opponents into loudly decrying how important and useful PWAs are - and that removing PWAs is the true, evil, anti-competitive strategy. (With all of their typical exaggeration, in reality we know PWAs are a limited-use feature.)
In short, Apple played the useful idiots into being their cheerleaders and provided Apple exactly what they needed to maintain this feature.
It didn't even take an "open letter" from "Taylor Swift" to "Tim Cook" this time.
tl,dr: Apple exploits anti-apple rhetoric to get their way, again.
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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).
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Apple knows exactly what the DMA wants from them, they're just deathly terrified of handing it over.
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.
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.
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/
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 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.
“Apple's iOS has some limitations when it comes to push notifications. For example, iOS devices do not support background sync, which means that PWA push notifications cannot be delivered to the device when the user is not actively using the app. Additionally, iOS devices do not support silent push notifications, which means that notifications cannot be delivered to the device without the user's knowledge.
Another limitation of iOS devices is that PWA push notifications cannot be delivered to the lock screen. Instead, they are delivered to the notification center, which can be accessed by swiping down from the top of the screen. This means that users may see the notification later, which could result in missed messages.”
Apple will maliciously comply until people give up.
Don’t get me wrong, Apple’s PWA implementation is very limited, but you can definitely have background notifications and lock screen notifications.
(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.
I mean, given the rest of their malicious compliance over the paranoia of losing App store power, this seems to align with their goals. The only kink in this armor comes from old history where the Jobs era clearly didn't like the idea of the web on iPhone, but market forces made them add in all sort of specific exceptions and restrictions for browsers at the end of the day.
But that was in the Jobs era, nearly a decade ago. I can see them wanting to slowly try again.
>Apple removed PWA support so they would not have to open up the APIs to other browsers. Period.
All other browsers of... Mozilla? Most other people are perfectly fine staying in webkit land. Even Google probably wouldn't change much if IOS opened up.
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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.
That said, I doubt it here. they thought a feature was barely used and got enough flack to realize it may get them in deep wanted with DMA. But we don't know how strict they are with PWAs specifically. They probably backed off to prevent anymore of the various issues they caused themselves over this whole thing.
They are not opening PWA's to other browser engines.
Added from Chrome? Runs in Chrome.
Added from Safari? Runs in WebKit.
etc.
Why the drama?