Yes, #Apple will demote WebApps to bookmarks on iOS 17.4 in the EU. Yes, they claim the EU is to blame. And no, that is not true IMHO. What is right is that under the DMA (Digital Market Access) rules WebApps could become a real escape route for Apps to avoid the Apple App Store tax. So better to close that possible loophole and blame the evil EU. IMHO. Reminds me a lot of the Cookie Banner stuff. Same story. Same blame game.
Apple can rely on the tech media and social networks algorithms to blow this out of proportion with people fighting over „Apple is evil“ and „Apple is always right“ while both sides will unconsciously support the wrong „The EU is evil“ argument. And THAT is what the spindoctors want you to believe.
@jwildeboer it's always incredible to me how many people love defending a trillion dollar company when faced with things it doesn't want/like to change.
@cmsirbu The pattern I am focusing on is that lobbying against democratic institutions by blaming them for every decision the Big Corps "have" to take, because there really, really is nothing they can do against those evil bureaucrats that limit "our" freedom to use their tech.
Ask yourself. If it really was EU regulations, why is this action from Apple limited to iOS? Why is it not announced nor implemented on MacOS and IpadOS at the same time?
UPDATE: Apple announced that they will NOT implement this change on iOS 17.4. So it wasn't the EU regulation after all, it seems. #WhereIsMySurprisedFace
The price gouging & profiteering is only possible with our cooperation.
I haven't been in a Home Depot, Hobby Lobby, or Chick-fil-A, etc in over 4 years. Never order from Uline anymore. Ditched the car & walk/cycle most places now.
We don't have to fund anti-democracy corporations.
@jwildeboer I don’t see this as a credible argument. If this were the case why does Apple still invest in web apps overall? They added web apps to Sonoma this past year, and the year before they added push notifications to iOS Safari. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10120/
@jwildeboer That's not a very plausible hypothesis / conspiracy theory. If they see PWAs as an unwanted escape route, why did they just recently improve them by adding support for push notifications in iOS 16.4, and are only demoting them in the EU?
@Gargron@takeitev@jwildeboer the web apps are served from somewhere. Depending on what a web app does, having a whole backend of always-running servers in one or more datacentres could be considered unnecessary.
@drfyzziks when you install a progressive web app it installs a service worker which usually caches all the assets related to the app and updates them in background once in a while. This is why they can also work in offline. So pretty much like normal apps.
@Gargron@jwildeboer number of tasks that people used to achieve with simple native software, that now has to waste energy either running in web browser, or even making web calls and execute APIs on servers. You'd be astonished.
So yes, cloud and web stuff has a substantial environmental cost. Sorry to break it to you :)
@jwildeboer Just yesterday I blocked someone for resorting to personal insults about this instead of explaining how other browsers don't have permissions or sandboxes and would be able to break out of the iOS sandbox.
There's so much security with these VMs we call web browsers there's nothing to Apple's claims.
@jwildeboer The Cookie Banner stuff drives me nuts. They pop these big forms in our face just to force us to click "OK" to get them to go away, and falsely blame GDPR for the mess. It's Trumpian tactics. I hope EU starts to sanction sites that does this.
@veronica@jwildeboer I know it's not so straightforward, but the GDPR rules should have stipulated that sites must respect the Do Not Track (DNT) option in the browser. No pop-ups needed.
But yes, they did a shitty implementation and its annoying and it’s intentionally annoying so you just accept tracking cookies that you didn't really want.
@matt@jwildeboer I mean, it doesn't really matter what I click, because I use an addon to block the cookies anyway, but for work it's less straightforward as we are not allowed addons on the work computer.
@matt@veronica And wehen that didn't work good enough, the ad industry happily found out that almost all of their tracking can be defined as "legitimate interest" (spoiler alert: that's not what legitimate interest means under EU regulations).
@veronica@jwildeboer what we need is enforcing of removal of data collected without consent, including that since delivered to other parties. That will solve the problem
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