While Safari’s desktop market share is minimal and it really only competes with Chrome directly on Macs. No one is going to use Chrome only features that don’t work on iPhones.
> No one is going to use Chrome only features that don’t work on iPhones.
Mostly facetious, but who except Americans cares about iOS anymore? Total iPhone market share is down to ~15% of smart phones worldwide. Android has the big lead now and doesn't look like it will relinquish it soon. Chrome only feature, works on ~85% of smart phones today? "Ship it," says the bottom line.
That feeds the point about market share though, at what point is iOS too much of a luxury brand that doesn't support the effort to get over that hump of "works in Chrome, ship it"?
"I don't care if the Maserati owner can't buy these wiper blades, because look how many more GMs and Fords there are on the road every day. I bet the Maserati owner flogs themselves if they accidentally even drive in the rain, how often do you think they replace their wipers?"
iOS market share, and it's luxury brand demeanor, leaves it at great risk. I don't know where that line is, myself, but pinning hopes on iOS preventing a browser monoculture seems increasingly desperate looking at current world figures.
No one is marketing “worldwide” with the same website. In the US, Europe, Japan, etc if you want to reach the middle class - you have to care about iOS.
You’re not talking about reaching people that can afford Maseratis versus Fords. More like the people who can afford a car vs people who can barely afford a bicycle.
If I was trying to reach poor people in developing countries the equation may be different.
Why? Apple has been playing the game of vendor lock-in for quite some time now. How does it make the situation any better? Heck, they have changed - and set a nasty precedent - their hardware for this exact purpose.
Large companies usually don’t act with a single voice. The iPhone is what stopped IE’s ability to dictate what the web would work like — not entirely without help but it’s what forced companies to treat support for other browsers as mandatory rather than nice-to-have – and WebKit was a huge win for open source, eventually including Chrome.
That doesn’t mean that things like Lightning connectors don’t also happen but in the context of the web Apple has generally been helpful for fighting monoculture since it used to be a huge threat to their continued existence.