Apple confirms iOS 17.4 removes Home Screen web apps in the EU

https://9to5mac.com/2024/02/15/ios-17-4-web-apps-european-union/

by Ezhik • 2 years ago

114 111 2 years ago

Ezhik• 2 years ago

Addressing the complex security and privacy concerns associated with web apps using alternative browser engines would require building an entirely new integration architecture that does not currently exist in iOS and was not practical to undertake given the other demands of the DMA and the very low user adoption of Home Screen web apps.

This makes me worried Apple will remove PWA support altogether.

mmcnl6• 2 years ago

This basically kills progressive web apps. The premise of PWA is that it can run on any device. If PWAs can't run on EU iPhones, quite a big market, then it makes zero sense for developers to invest in building PWAs. So unfortunate.

Dalewyn• 2 years ago

it makes zero sense for developers to invest in building PWAs

I can't see this as anything but a solid win for end users.

I am fucking tired of non-native, JavaShit-laden "web apps" that each demand a dozen web browser processes and run like drunken dogs on a Friday night.

gjsman-10005• 2 years ago

To be honest, outside of Hacker News and other "nerd" circles, I have never heard anyone talk about PWAs. Outside our circles, I would not be shocked if literally nobody cares about them. Basically dead on arrival.

The only place I've really seen them talked about is the Microsoft Store, where they can be sold as apps. They also all have 2 stars or less with people screeching "PWA - not an app!"

lxgr12• 2 years ago

Yeah, it effectively forces all but the largest mobile app developers to commit to native iOS apps.

Apple is definitely happy about this. PWAs always seemed like a regulatory fig leaf more than something they really care about.

snapcaster• 2 years ago

Hopefully! I hate PWAs, would be nice silver lining

dangus• 2 years ago

It's as if developing an operating system with the assumption that it will only ever support one browsing engine forever was misguided in the first place.

65102• 2 years ago

very low user adoption

I first had to add the add to homescreen button to the share menu with the "Edit Actions" option.

If I search add to homescreen button missing I find nothing... or worse actually. They say to restart safari, restart the phone and then reinstall iOS.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8345497?sortBy=best

I've considered making a page on my website explaining how to do this but it smells to much like something the user is not suppose to do. It's asking a lot? Very suspicious? Am I getting hacked?

monocularvision• 2 years ago

People need to own the unintended side effects of their preferred regulation instead of constantly complaining about companies not embracing the “spirit” of said regulation.

jcotton42• 2 years ago

This is 100% malicious compliance or spite from Apple. The DMA did not in any way require them to dump PWAs.

mikestew• 2 years ago

Apple argues otherwise, and I find their argument to be reasonable. What are the specifics of your disagreement?

alwa• 2 years ago

It sounds like it would, though, require an engineering effort on par with building a new feature from scratch in order to support PWAs in the DMA environment. It makes sense that a firm might be willing to invest in minimal maintenance of a feature, but wouldn’t build it again if faced with the choice today. And the DMA forced the choice again today.

Since ~nobody uses PWAs, or at least so few people that Apple can’t justify the effort to retain any advantages PWAs confer on its own browser/OS, doesn’t it become a business decision at that point?

szasamasa4• 2 years ago

agree

very WEAK arguments from apple, practically lies

mac os users have been safe from service workers and web app capabilities using chrome and firefox and edge in the last 5-10 years

surely apple is able to keep ios and ipados users safe from these scary other browser engines

it is much easier to safeguard 3-10 other browser engines than millions of native apps

in addition, do they really have to pay attention to other than chrome, edge and firefox? if somebody uses a chinese spy browser or a russian, the same when somebody downloads any other spying ot malicious native app

do they even need to care about me optin out from safari on MY 1000 dollar iphone?

what the fuck, I am not a child!

keep safari safe and at max give me some warning before downloading chrome or firefox or whatever!

jnovek• 2 years ago

This is not a “failure to embrace”, this is malicious compliance.

zamfi3• 2 years ago

Hmm -- are you suggesting that Apple is lying in their rationales here? That they should have instead kept supporting PWAs but only on WebKit, in violation of the DMA? Or that they should have argued the DMA doesn't require PWA support for alternative browser engines?

Or that it's in fact straightforward to offer an API for browser engines to integrate with caching, background operations, notifications, etc., and Apple should have held off compliance with DMA until these were implemented?

If so I'd love to learn more. I'm sort of inclined to believe that these currently sit deep in WebKit and it's a nontrivial exercise to pull them out and offer them as an API to other browser engines.

ajayyy• 2 years ago

On Android, I can create a PWA that runs in Firefox and it works great. Apple could easily implement the same thing

drooopy2• 2 years ago

Can confirm. I have an android device that was given to me by my company and PWAs work just fine in Firefox. It's not a matter of technical limitations, it's just the poor multitrillion dollar company is gonna screw over their customers while scary government bureaucrats won't let them have their cake and eat it as well.

charcircuit2• 2 years ago

"Apple could easily implement the same thing"

This is quite easier said than done. Simply copying a feature from competitor is not neccessarily easy especially if they challenge deep architectural decisions that have been made in the past.

the_third_wave• 2 years ago

Indeed, and the icon has a Firefox badge on it so I know it is Firefox running the show. If things go south I know who to blame: Firefox. The same goes for Cromite (which used to be Bromite, which is a de-fanged de-Googled version of Chromium) or any other browser which offers this functionality.

See, Apple? This is how you can implement PWAs so that users do not accuse you of other browser's problems. Then again I assume this is already known in Cupertino but not implemented because it would break down that wall around the garden, brick by brick.

rcMgD2BwE72F• 2 years ago

So PWA also must be removed from Android for DMA compliance I guess? Let's see if Google remove them because "DMA" or if Google ends up being sanctioned for this.

rany_• 2 years ago

Addressing the complex security and privacy concerns associated with web apps using alternative browser engines would require building an entirely new integration architecture that does not currently exist in iOS and was not practical to undertake given the other demands of the DMA and the very low user adoption of Home Screen web apps.

If alternative browser engines and PWA is enough to pwn iOS, maybe it was never really secure in the first place.

shuckles• 2 years ago

Why use this extremely indirect signal to evaluate security when the direct signals like exploit markets indicate iOS is among the most secure consumer computing environments ever?

0x4572• 2 years ago

Do you not know how JIT works?

SkiFire132• 2 years ago

How is JIT relevant here? We're talking about removing homescreen shortcuts to PWAs. This doesn't limit JIT in any way.

lxgr12• 2 years ago

They explicitly allow JIT for DMA third-party browser engines (even for embedded engines, I believe, which is technically quite tricky to do compared to for full browser apps!), so that can't be the problem here.

thesz• 2 years ago

An application may not "pwn" device directly, but it can execute an attack on the out-of-order CPU and steal valuable data.

lxgr12• 2 years ago

If you're talking about Spectre-like attacks from within PWAs, the same risk exists for every page you visit using Safari today (and "Firefox EU edition" on iOS tomorrow).

lxgr12• 2 years ago

Wow. I have no words. This is quite something, even for Apple.

to comply with the DMA’s requirements, we had to remove the Home Screen web apps feature in the EU. [...] Still, we regret any impact this change [...] may have.

Regrets all the way to the bank. I'm sure it has nothing to do with the Core Technology Fee whatsoever.

gjsman-10005• 2 years ago

To be fair, not even Firefox (desktop) can be bothered to support PWA.

PWA is, as an honest assessment, dead. It was a neat idea - kind of like BeOS or Amiga - but it's dead.

My personal take is this is because PWA had too little to define itself to the everyday Joe with. The appeal of PWA was primarily to developers - because then they wouldn't need to build apps or pay fees. What appeals to developers though, doesn't have any intrinsic appeal to Joe.

lxgr12• 2 years ago

That may be so, but why did Apple start providing Safari/macOS support for PWAs less than half a year ago with the latest macOS launch then? They clearly care about it a little bit.

soundnote• 2 years ago

I haven't used PWAs on mobile much, but use them a lot on desktop. They're very useful things.

yungporko• 2 years ago

perfect, i'm so glad that one feature i actually use is being taken away in exchange for two features i never even wanted.

anton96• 2 years ago

As I'm looking at the vision pro and try to envision what I could with it, when I think of developing a new app for it, those kind of extreme hostilities come to my mind now.

It just shows they don't care, they are releasing a whole new platform right now and at the same time show one of the most abusing attitude to developer I think we have rarely seen.

Apple app store condition were already overreaching but this time they really went the extra length with every single of their DMA adaptations.

emsy• 2 years ago

Yeah, see also the iPad such a powerful, well engineered device, held back by what I can do with it.

chongli• 2 years ago

It just shows they don't care

That's not at all the case. Apple does care, a lot. It's just that their interests are not perfectly aligned with yours (or most developers).

The issue is that Apple needs 3rd party developers because a platform without apps has little value. However, there are so many developers on iOS that individuals have almost no leverage. Thus Apple invests their resources into the fattest part of the curve (developers of highly monetized games, mostly) because it gives them the best returns. It's not economical for them to focus on the elite developer's highly specific needs.

HL33tibCe72• 2 years ago

The reasoning here from Apple seems reasonable to me to be honest - they’ve gone into a surprising level of technical detail, quite interesting. I suspect many in this thread are commenting without actually reading their argument.

lxgr12• 2 years ago

The reasoning can at the same time be technically correct ("we would have needed to allow Firefox and other browsers to provide homescreen PWAs as well in our read of the DMA, and that would have been somewhat annoying") and highly motivated by business interests ("oh, I guess you'll have to develop native apps now and pay us a CTF for them").

threeseed5• 2 years ago

and that would have been somewhat annoying

Allowing PWA to access the camera/microphone without system prompts and install other apps on the device is a little more than just annoying.

jwagenet4• 2 years ago

People want to do whatever they please on iPhone, but also expect Apple to create all the appropriate interfaces to accommodate them basically for free.

FirmwareBurner7• 2 years ago

basically for free

iPhone costs ~$1000, with the highest profit margins on hardware plus AppStore out of any phone maker = for free lol.

Is this astroturfing HN loves to provide Apple for free? Apple fans will go out of their way to white knightly defend a trillion dollar company who can easily afford do implement any regulatory challenge, gaslighting you for having the audacity to hold Apple accountable to a high standards, as if they're some broke 3 person start-up scraping behind the couch cushions for money, when Apple is absolutely minted with the GDP of an entire country.

robhlt• 2 years ago

Apple has already done that for decades with macOS and its predecessors. The OS and its programming interfaces were always just included with the hardware purchase. Occasionally they would charge for a major OS upgrade, which Apple could always bring back if they can't survive without the app store tax revenue.

adrr2• 2 years ago

Its not honest. PWA has the same functionality as standard web app. You still need to grant permissions like Microphone Access, Camera access. Only difference is that a PWA has a manifest which defines appearance, splash screens, localization. Here's the starbucks PWA which is one the most popular PWAs.

https://app.starbucks.com/

threeseed5• 2 years ago

You still need to grant permissions like Microphone Access, Camera access

"including isolation of storage and enforcement of system prompts to access privacy impacting capabilities on a per-site basis"

One scenario is that today there is one instance of WebKit owned by the Home Screen process shared amongst all of the PWA apps which is enforcing that prompt. With third party engines that prompt would appear for the first app invocation but not any subsequent ones.

This is only an issue with PWA since for normal apps the browser process is per-app rather than shared.

Now they could rewrite the Home Screen execution environment to support one engine per app but their argument is that it's not worth their effort.

_factor• 2 years ago

Try comparing that pwa to the native app and you'll soon find that most navigation ends up with quasi browser bars that obstruct the UI and slow the experience down.

Apple surely does this on purpose to prevent PWAs from being useful. Can't let any App store competition arise.

MichaelMug• 2 years ago

Could they not have created a API browser vendors could implement, and the user can select in the settings app which implementation they want to use for running PWA's? With the default implementation being whatever the user selected for their default browser?

For example Apple has `UIWebView` and `JavaScriptCore`. They could have abstracted the implementation so PWA's run in like a `UIHomeScreenWebAppView` which requires a protocol `IWebView` and `IJavaScriptEngine`.

Implementations could delegate OS integration tasks back to the operating system. For example notifications.

The technical approach and legwork is already done with React Native.

I can appreciate that Apple has put in a lot of thought into this but it seems like they are not following the spirit of the DMA laws. And I can understand why.

kayodelycaon• 2 years ago

The issue is isolating each PWA from each other and giving permissions per site, for example, camera. Right now, a single instance of Safari is the only thing enforcing that. If you swapped Safari out for Chrome, that isolation is gone. If one PWA has camera access at the OS level, all of them have it.

veeti• 2 years ago

Yet somehow Android and Chrome with the same sandboxed security model manages to do it just fine. Makes you wonder.

ijhuygft776• 2 years ago

native apps are potentially much less secure... why don't they also remove them?

breather2• 2 years ago

What are "web apps"? Is this just a bookmark to some site?

superfist• 2 years ago

PWA

breather2• 2 years ago

Derp, thank you, I forgot these existed.

65102• 2 years ago

Kinda, but if I remember correctly the website can be designed to open by it self rather than in safari with its own navigation menu. It can do a bunch of other things too.

realusername2• 2 years ago

Between that and the "alternative stores", I guess they really, really want those fines.

drooopy2• 2 years ago

Well, this just forces my hand to buy an android device next year when my iPhone will no longer be supported by iOS.

stephc_int13• 2 years ago

Apple is run by glorified accountants.

Jobs and Ive are long gone.

I would expect a bit more decency and awareness, but they probably suffer some kind of tunnel vision.

JoshTriplett3• 2 years ago

On the contrary, I don't think accountants would tell Apple to pick a fight with the EU; idealists would. They may not share your ideals, or mine, but doing "letter of the law" and "bare minimum malicious compliance" is absolutely something someone does because their principles would be offended by doing otherwise.

FirmwareBurner7• 2 years ago

I don't think accountants would tell Apple to pick a fight with the EU;

They don't have any fight with the EU yet.

Apple's accountants and lawyer are only engaging in malicious compliance with the EU so that they cause the most annoyance in the EU while still being legally in the green to not have a fight.

It's precisely what accountants and lawyers would do.

jonatanpedersen• 2 years ago

Time to switch to Android

tmaly• 2 years ago

I am curious how they have approached this in the code structure.

It sounds like it could be a challenge to maintain if multiple regulatory bodies across the globe start asking for their own little changes.

miramba• 2 years ago

Can someone please clarify? Deep down I hope that "home screen apps" means something else than the recently added support for PWAs... Does this mean PWAs will not work anymore on iOS?

pmuw• 2 years ago

There is a bug in Safari's Intelligent Tracking Protection where sometimes when I visit one of my own websites, it will refuse to send an auth cookie. ITP forces this behavior if you have used Safari for seven consecutive days without visiting a website... but it seems to occasionally happen by mistake, which is very frustrating UX. This problem doesn't exist with home-screen web apps, which are now unavailable in the EU.

rambambram2• 2 years ago

It's just a f*cking link on the home screen. Opening in the browser of the user's choice.

This doesn't only hurt PWA's, it also hurts very simple webapps that are nothing more than a responsive website with some functionality and data. Made easily accessible by a link (with title and favicon) on the homescreen.

Of course, one can open a browser, wait, click again on some bookmark icon, scroll to the webapp, click it, wait again... and use it just like that.

The world wide web is an evil place. Luckily Apple protects everybody with an iPhone. The year of the Linux desktop, Linux tablet, Linux phone, Linux smartwatch, Linux AR glasses could not come soon enough.

FirmwareBurner7• 2 years ago

Luckily Apple protects everybody with an iPhone. The year of the Linux desktop, Linux tablet, Linux phone, Linux smartwatch, Linux AR glasses could not come soon enough.

No chance, look at HN, the top comments are defending Apple's stance. If even tech savvy geeks lap up Apple's propaganda, what hope is there for the average user?

rambambram2• 2 years ago

Exactly. Try to forget the average user for a while. The niche is smaller but still exists.

I think it's possible. Think of a combination of Jobs's vision of a hub-and-spoke model of computing devices, powered by SBC's and Waveshare components and open source software. For a start.

It won't be premium devices as people are now expecting of Apple devices, but there comes a point where people are willing to trade in nicer hardware for nicer software and functionality.

I don't know who the early adopters are going to be of this, but I know a lot of comment sections on HN with people also fed up about the direction of big tech.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

[dupe]

More discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39371119

spaceheater• 2 years ago

The only real reason to use PWA so far was access to Web Push Notifications on iOS, which likely to stop working altogether. If you fork $99 to apple, you may be able to use "Safari Push Notifications". Maybe one of their 600 new apis will allow Chrome to show notifications?

Apple confirms iOS 17.4 removes Home Screen web apps in the EU

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