This week, Webventures published an article outlining various bugs and problems in iOS Safari over the last several years that were absolute showstoppers for the Web being a competitive constraint and substitute for mobile app stores.
iOS Safari is more than an inconvenience for developers, it's the fundamental reason interoperability has been stymied in mobile ecosystems; frequent showstopping bugs, a large patch gap, and lack of competing engines ensures the web is not a credible competitor to native. Here are the receipts to prove it Webventures
This is an excellent and comprehensive article and we recommend reading it in full.
Web Apps are being held back as businesses and developers can not be confident that they will consistently work on iOS, a platform no business can ignore without losing (in many cases) more than half their customers.
The critical issue here is that regulators can not regulate a browser not to have bugs or to fix them quickly. Browsers are complex and some level of bugs is to be expected. Browser vendors also need to work out which bugs to prioritise. The problem here is lack of effective browser competition on iOS.
This is due to Apple's decision to ban rival browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi and Brave from porting their "real" browsers to iOS using their own engines. Apple does this by rule 2.5.6 of their app store guidelines.
When a critical bug breaks Web Apps on iOS for months, Apple has no great fear it will lose Safari users to rival browsers because they are introducing the exact same bugs into their rivals browsers via imposing their browser engine on third-party browsers. Rival browser vendors have very little control here when it comes to stability on iOS. This lack of fear of losing users removes a powerful incentive to be better.
The solution is clear: fair and effective browser competition on iOS globally. This involves both allowing browser vendors to port their browsers, removing rules that prevent them from competing and giving the software and hardware API access they need to implement and compete in features, stability, performance security and privacy. This will place great pressure on Apple to improve and improve fast. It also provides an alternative for both developers and consumers should they fail to do so.
Already we can see that regulatory pressure has led to some improvement but in order to be truly effective the underlying competition issues need to be fixed, and fixed globally.
If you spot any mistakes or have additional issues that you believe should be included please contact the author. If any of the unfixed tickets referenced in the article are important to you or your team, please comment on them; this is important as it's evidence to both Apple and regulators that these issues are important and need to be fixed. If you're active on social media, you can point Safari developer relations to the link to your comment, too.
As an organisation, our aim is to allow fair and effective browser and Web App competition on all major consumer operating systems. OWA has so much more work to do advocating for the web all over the globe.
We will always need your support, and you can do that in many ways:
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