I thought Apple came up w/ WebGPU, and also that it had worked on iPhones in the past..? Maybe I misremembered. Caniuse shows it as red /unsupported in iOS, and further searching led me to this huge list of webgl bugs in webkit:
https://bugs.webkit.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=__open__&comp...
Apple made a proposal for WebGPU that was kind of WebMetal with a dialect of HLSL. The final WebGPU standard has little in common and is not supported by Safari yet. My belief is that a big part of Apple's reason for proposing a new standard at all was to force a venue change to W3C instead of Khronos, due to legal disputes they had (maybe still have?) with Nvidia.
Apple also created the OpenCL standard; they love nothing more than setting up cross vendor standards to fail. I absolutely hate them for that one in particular.
Actually the blame lies on Khronos side, alongside Google, Intel and AMD ineptude to do anything of value with OpenCL.
For a very long time Apple's platforms were the only ones with a proper OpenCL support, until they gave up and went their own merry way, without Khronos politics.
> For a very long time Apple's platforms were the only ones with a proper OpenCL support
I'm curious about this, since I never had a problem with OpenCL on Intel, AMD, Nvidia and am pretty sure I did with Apple in the beginning. Shipping two commercial OpenCL apps since 2010 (and they still work excellently on all of them).