Apple's Assault on Standards

Apple has deftly used a false cloak of security and privacy to move the internet, and web in particular, toward enclosure and irrelevance. This post makes the case for why Apple should be considered a corrupted, and indeed incompetent, autocrat in our digital lives. It abuses a unique form of monopoly to extract rents, including on the last remnants of open ecosystems it tolerates.

Worse, Apple's centralisation through the App Store entrenches the positions of peer big tech firms, harming the prospects of competitors in turn. Apple have been, over the course of many years, poisonous to internet standards and the moral commitments of that grand project.

Sometimes apps are nice, but I'd still much rather see all the functionality browsers allow into iOS/iPadOS. Safari is holding it back.

Developers are forced into the App Store by missing web capabilities, ensuring an advantage for Apple's proprietary ecosystem. This induces wealthy and influential users to default to the App Store for software, further damping the competitiveness of open platforms.

Yup...PWAs are handicapped, instead of having one app for the web, now devs and companies need to develop the web app, an iPhone app, and an Android app.

So long as competing vendors are forced into the App Store and required to use Apple's engine, Cupertino owes much more when it comes to completeness and quality. So long as Cupertino compels use of WebKit, the demand should be echoed back: parity with browser features on other Operating Systems is the minimum bar.

Fundamentally, the web and internet community must stop accepting the premise that Apple should benefit from the protections and privileges of voluntary feature adoption while denying it to others.

Just open up iOS to different browser engines already...sigh.