Firefox @lemmy.ml libreom @lemmings.world 4 mo. ago

Apple attempting killing PWAs in EU: Action Needed

open-web-advocacy.org Immediate Action Needed! - Open Web Advocacy

Apple has officially announced that they attempting to kill web apps in the EU, which will have ramifications worldwide

Apple has decided to remove Progressive web apps from iOS in EU. If you have a business in the EU or serve EU users via Web App/PWA, we must hear from you in the next 48 hours!

52 comments

Didn't Firefox kill PWA support too.

What was Mozilla's reason behind this?
- Only on the desktop. PWAs still exist on the mobile version of it.
  
  Thank you. Wasn't sure about mobile myself.
  
  Do they? I haven't been able to figure it how to save a shortcut for a PWA, so all the PWAs on my phone use Chrome :/
- Reasons were basically too much maintenance for little benefit on the desktop they could see
  
  Meanwhile, they remove GTK and Qt theming from Thunderbird
  
  (n.b.: I actually agree that PWAs have little more benefit on the desktop than a bookmark, but still)
What's wrong with PWA? And why Apple whould even care for other devs choosing PWA or native apps?
- Money. They don't get a cut of a pwa app.
  
  Could that be applied to Mozilla as well? Like 'they use our browser wrong way, we now turn PWA off'? 😁
- Nothing is wrong with PWA. This is nothing but petty backlash from Apple for the EU trying to force them to allow competition.
Or we could just stop pretending iOS is worth being supported by customers. It's not. It's the most closed of the closed ecosystems, and worthy of being abandoned and nothing else.
- Yeah, good luck with that mate.
I have literally never used a web app from the 3gs to this day. No idea why people think this is such a huge deal?
- The lemmy app Voyager for iOS, one of the most popular as it behaves like Apollo from Reddit, is a PWA.
  
  There is a native app for voyager though which is also pretty dope. Can recommend, am using it to type this.
  
  Interesting. Personally I've been using Mlem with great success on iOS.
- The big deal is this was the only way you could bypass Apple's app store tax.
- Because for 90% of the time, you couldn’t. It was only implemented in iOS 16 or 17 I believe.
- I'm using Android but I can give you a few personal examples on why I still prefer mobile websites to apps.
  
  The place where I take weather has a shitty app full of ads and always sending notifications. They don't have PWA offered on their site but just going through a browser instead of the app is significantly better.
  
  YouTube's app is also full of ads. So I use the mobile website in Firefox with uBlock Origin.
  
  Again with awful apps full of ads. Twitter is also much more tolerable through the mobile website. There's no autoplay on FF and again, ads blocked.
  
  I still use IRC and my client is web based, so that I can see pictures and videos in my chats. The web based IRC client (The Lounge) offers PWA and it's very nice to have the thing in a "clean" browser.
  
  Again, I don't use Apple for reasons like this, but Firefox is already pretty bad with PWA and having those possibilities mangled or removed wouldn't be acceptable to me.
  
  Maybe you don't use a browser on mobile and just do everything through terrible apps. Maybe most people do the same. But if you don't use it, why do you care if those using it want to retain the possibility to do so?
  
  I personally don't watch TV so nobody watches TV anymore, right?
  
  For YouTube, I've found NewPipe (and probably others) offers a much better experience than YouTube in the web.
  
  The real reason I want PWAs to be a thing is because I don't want to always use iOS and Android, and PWAs allow me to use an alternative. I really want to use a Linux phone like Pinephone, and PWAs will be a big part of that transition. PWAs are the only truly cross-platform development option, so they offer value to web devs as well as users.
  
  Interesting. I do visit a few websites regularly but I guess I've always just kept the tabs open in Safari and called it a day. (And Safari just stays in permanent Privacy mode so that as much tracking data is flushed as possible each time I close a tab.)
They’re removing pwa from the desktop, not stopping them from functioning entirely.

You can still have a cobbled together insecure piece of trash but you gotta go to its url in the browser instead of clicking the app.

Hell, you can still have a shortcut to it on the desktop.
- insecure piece of trash
  
  Websites are more tightly sandboxed and more secure than native apps.
  
  you gotta go to its url in the browser instead of clicking the app.
  
  PWAs are more than just an app icon. "PWA" also means usage of particular APIs such as allowing the web app to work offline.
  
  I’m not gonna get into a back and forth over pwa security. It’s worth noting that offline pwa hasn’t worked on iOS for at least a year and two major versions of the os.
- How is it more insecure than a website?
  
  @kilgore_trout @bloodfart apple wants people to jump through THEIR hoops to run anything on their phone, so they can get a 30% cut of the money. That's why they're so rich. PWAs bypass that. Apple would kill off web browsers too if they had the power - just like they did kill off Flash, which made the web too powerful for Apple at the time, giving not enough incentive to install their walled garden apps.
  
  How is a piece of software that runs in the browser instead of directly in the os, uses a million little libraries and became popular as a way to avoid scrutiny on the distribution platform less secure than a website?
  
  Let’s assume you have great answers for all that and I’m made to look like a fool: when someone goes to a website, their guard is up. When they click on an app their guard is down.
  
  If nothing else pwas bypass user distrust of weird crap on the internet and that’s a bad thing

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