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by mohave529 2098 days ago
From what I've been reading, Apple specifically worked with Amazon to tweak Safari to support Luna. Definitely opens up questions of anticompetitive similar to how Prime Video has a special deal with Apple to not pay the full 30% App store fee.
1 comments
scarface74 2098 days ago
Do you have any evidence that Amazon is using some secret Safari API that Google and Microsoft can’t use?

Netflix and Hulu had the same deal from day one reportedly.

Do you think any business makes the same deals with other big players that they make with small players? If so, you’ve never been in the room when CxOs are making enterprise deals with companies like MS and Oracle.

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mohave529 2098 days ago
Clipped from the following article: https://www.engadget.com/luna-amazon-cloud-gaming-interview-...

“We worked with the Safari team to ensure that some of the things that weren't there are there, and that allowed us to kind of get to where we are today,” Luna head of engineering and technology George Tsipolitis said.

I don't know if these APIs are secret, so much as didn't exist before. I assume that Google and Microsoft are free to leverage these as well now.

And fair enough, I haven't been a part of larger enterprise deals in my career so far.

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newhouseb 2098 days ago
I'm very curious what these changes are.

Last I looked at PWAs they would get you 95% of the way there for most things, but a number of issues made the use of them as an alternative to native apps untenable (namely the reliable persistence of any data). If Amazon can pull off streaming arbitrary content, full screen with low-latency touch streaming in a way that doesn't feel janky, that'd be a pretty exciting workaround to the App Store regime.

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scarface74 2098 days ago
The reliability of local data controversy was overblown. Local storage only has a 7 day expiry when the page is not saved to the Home Screen.

https://love2dev.com/pwa/ios/

Unused web apps that have not been added to the homescreen will have their cached assets purged after 7 days. This is less of a problem than most think.

Also, iOS devices routinely perform better than Android devices with respect to web rendering and JS performance. Even the cheapest iPhone - the iPhone SE is more performant than any Android.

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fomine3 2098 days ago
iPhone's SoCs are really great but I doubt iOS Safari's WebGL+JavaScript performance outperforms Android's native app.
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scarface74 2098 days ago
The average Android device is not exactly a top of the kind phone on top of that, Java based Android apps aren’t exactly known for performance.

If the top of the line Android phones are slower than the $399 SE, can you imagine how slow the average Android phone is?

But I think this is all a moot point, there shouldn’t be any heavy lifting on the client and all phones have special hardware to handle streaming video.

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scarface74 2098 days ago
Just for completeness. Apple also worked with Epic for years to make sure the Unreal engine worked well with iOS.

https://bgr.com/2020/09/17/fortnite-lawsuit-apple-epic-games...

Apple has also worked with Adobe, Microsoft and Amazon and given them pre-release hardware and access to software.

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