This is one thing - retaliation. Apple is removing PWAs as retaliation against the EU and this also helps them, think about it, as I said countless times, sideloading won’t most likely be “install any application from anywhere” like a regular computer, it will be “you can install applications from 3rd party stores that will have to buy a certificate and sign their apps as well”.
By removing PWAs Apple makes sure nobody can use them to circumvent their bullshit policies and allow users to create their own small applications like people have been doing for ever when they want to avoid publishing to the store. Just think about it, the level of performance that you can get with a PWA is more than enough for your run of the mill in-house tool / application and I’ve seem many companies going this route.
The removal of web apps was announced 4 years ago
Arguably, two of the best Fediverse clients - Voyager (Lemmy) and Phanpy (Mastodon) are PWAs. While you can get Voyager from the App Store, Phanpy remains in pure PWA form only so this pretty much sucks.
Mlem and Mona are 10,000x better
Mlem has been great and just gets better.
I’m a simple guy, someone gave me Apollo for Lemmy so I can carry on with my years of muscle memory. And since I’m ex-redditor I need my Mastodon conversations threaded so it’s Phanpy or Ice Cubes for me.
Mlem is very Apollo-like for me, especially because it’s native swift like Apollo was
What really got me on board with Voyager is how it copied UI pixel perfect. Most apps can’t get things like font size and spacing right and it annoys me more than it probably should.
I tried it, and while it comes closest to resembling Apollo, being a PWA makes it fall short in terms of gestures properly registering every time and it also exhibits the typical Safari issue of falling back to scrolling the page body when trying to scroll a container (hard to explain).
It was definitely an issue but I think it got better over time. Or maybe I got used to it but I’m fairly certain that at least most annoying quirks were fixed.
What a stupid, shortsighted move. This is one case where they should have left the feature in, and dealt with the fallout later (if there even is any fallout).
It’s a move that pits users against the EU for a policy Apple is choosing.
…since the web apps are also based on Safari and WebKit, Apple may have opted to remove PWAs in the EU so that it wouldn’t be accused of further leveraging its own engine.
What I expect it to be. Basically, removing functionality to avoid possible legal conflict whilst simultaneously ‘proving a point’.
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This is not “enshittification”. How quickly that term is coming to mean “anything I don’t like”.
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It’s nacho-libre software.
If they don’t they might be infringing the legislation :P… but the PWA thing isn’t about legislation, it’s plain retaliation as described here.
Be careful of what you ask for… the law of unintended consequences when politicians meddle in tech which they’re supremely unqualified to do.
I am most amused right now that people thought the EU “sticking it” to Apple was the end game. If you don’t like it buy android I guess.
