[paulvorobyev]

>Apple’s biggest competition right now is the web. More and more “apps” are just thin, non-native veneers on top of web sites (cf Zoom, Slack, Steam, etc). The issue for Apple is, why would anyone choose Apple devices if the exact same apps are available on all devices? Apple should be doing everything it can to support good third-party developers that make the real Apple apps that make Apple devices unique, and provide cool Apple-only experiences. But, again, all the developers I know who do this are dying off, because of the App Store’s policies. Even Omni Group had layoffs a couple months ago.

NO! Stop giving Apple more reasons to ruin the web. The browser lock-in on iOS, poor support for modern browser features, and lack of any native interfacing is beyond unforgivable. For Apple, the web is a second-class citizen and it's bordering on lunacy to suggest otherwise.

[flatiron]

Genuinely interested how you think their WebKit (which they started from KHTML back in the day) implementation has “poor support for modern browser features” I agree with browser lock in though. But I feel that iOS is so successful that they don’t treat the web as a second class citizen. It’s just WebKit...

[realusername]

I'm a web developer, Safari mobile feels honestly on the borderline of being abandoned, every time I look at their new Safari release, there's a least a minimum of 6 to 8 years of lagging behind Chrome and Firefox (and that's just the features we're talking about here, not basic layout, forms & css bugs they still have...). I generally spend as much time to fix Safari mobile as IE11

[Nextgrid]

What kind of features are we talking about though? As a user I don’t see what I really miss out on by using Safari. If anything, the lack of user-hostile features such as push notifications is a good thing.

[realusername]

You don't see you're missing out because there's people spending hours to adapt the website to make it work...

For the features, I could mention from what I ran into myself: input[type="number"] (yes, they still have not fixed their implementation after all those years...), the full screen api, Media Source Extensions, css ::selection, Intersection Observers, autofocus (yes, even that does not work), I could add a lot more here.

And that's not mentioning the various bugs you have on this platforms, again some example of what I ran into:

- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18047353/fix-css-hover-o... (yes, you read it well, even tapping on an element does not work as normal)

- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11768364/svg-scaling-iss... (svg rendering issues)

- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52826005/workaround-for-... (iframe focus bug)

There's plenty of weird quirks like this everywhere. It's never completely broken but it's pretty comparable to the time you spend fixing things on IE11 honestly.

[robertoandred]

Laughably beyond hyperbole.

[chongli]

I find this back and forth really interesting. On the one hand, you have Apple who wants to make app developers into a commodity and their platform (iOS) the premium experience. On the other hand, you have app developers and cross platform framework developers trying to make the platform into a commodity. Strange bedfellows indeed!

Personally, I miss the days of classic Mac OS when both the platform and the applications were premium, high quality software. No in-app purchases, no subscriptions, no microtransactions, no shitty web frameworks. Everything was native and really well designed. The operating system and third party apps were all part of a cohesive experience.

[wilshipley]

My argument wasn’t for ruining the web. It was saying, look, there are a ton of apps out there that are written (usually using emulation layers) for basically all platforms, and if Apple kills off all its native, independent developers, those are the ONLY apps that will exist.

At that point, there won’t be much reason to buy Apple products. Of course, Apple says they have the best products and ecosystem, blah blah blah. (And it’s an ecosystem I largely like, to be fair.) But Apple should not become so arrogant that they think customers will flock to buy their products based only on the Apple’s own software.

Innovation comes from the small, independent developers. The first web browser for Mac OS X, the first PDF viewer for Mac OS X, the first image viewer for Mac OS X, and the first video barcode scanner on ANY platform were all created outside Apple.

Also, Pages and Keynote are rewrites of Pages and Concurrence (apps created by Lighthouse Design for NeXTstep) done _by the some of the same people who did the originals_.

It’s easy once you the hit mega-billion-dollar success level to forget how many of your products and ideas didn’t come from inside your company. But also fatal.

-Wil

[the_lucifer]

> At that point, there won’t be much reason to buy Apple products. Of course, Apple says they have the best products and ecosystem, blah blah blah. (And it’s an ecosystem I largely like, to be fair.) But Apple should not become so arrogant that they think customers will flock to buy their products based only on the Apple’s own software.

In fact, this exact approach with Safari and Extensions have driven away a lot of users to Firefox and Chrome