Easily. Besides being forced to allow sideloading and competing app stores, Apple & Google should be forced to allow competing browser engines and allow for progressive web apps to be installed just like ordinary apps.
If anyone would like to help fight for the future of Web Apps and the Web on mobile please join the effort at <a href="https://open-web-advocacy.org" rel="nofollow">https://open-web-advocacy.org</a>
Competition authorities must force Apple to allow alternative Browser Engines on their platform ASAP and this must include allowing Electron with full access to all Hardware components.
Electron on Desktop and Mobile would be a game-changer - fantastic for Developers and Consumers.
I literally started a deep dive into the current state of progressive web app support on iOS this week. WebKit does seem limited on many html apis, but I haven’t seen the bugs this article mentions, yet.<p>Back at the release in 2007, web apps were the original way to build for the iPhone until Apple got the App Store working. Apps became king because of the 30% cut.
Every once in awhile I try to switch out my native apps for web apps where possible, and the problem is that the web apps are always very noticeably worse. Maybe there's a fix for that, but if so it's a different problem than "monopoly power".
it will be really cool to write more capable web apps using browser engine libraries(webview), so you have true cross platform apps(from desktop to android and ios), it's the only way to achieve that.<p>the problem is really on apple's side, if its own webkit keeps ignoring the new advancements in web apis intentionally(PWA, new web apis,etc), at least it should allow a true thrid-party browser engine installed who can do it. a true chrome will be much better at least.<p>what apple does has to be stopped via lawsuits as microsoft experienced in the early days for its browser and OS exclusive tight integration.
Eh, for once I don’t think I agree with Doctorow. Replacing native apps with web apps is just swapping an oligopoly of mobile platforms based on proprietary APIs for an oligopoly of browser engines based on a Red Queen’s race of keeping up with ever-evolving standards and de-facto standards that are already too prohibitively massive to allow for an independent implementation to emerge. I’m not seeing that as much of an improvement, especially given how Mozilla have been behaving lately.
> Apple has systematically underinvested in Webkit, so that major bugs remain unaddressed for years and years. Some of these bugs are functional – Webkit just doesn't act the way its documentation says it does – but others represent serious security vulnerabilities.<p>Citation needed.
For whatever it's worth: on my Android I use Brave to run Facebook, Twitter, and Nextdoor, the same way as in the old days, before smartphones even existed: by typing in the URL. No apps needed for those.<p>Except it's even easier than in the old days, because Brave remembers where you went, holds the credentials, and puts an icon on the start page for them.
Given how bad the mobile web is and how little consideration for mobile performance web developers have, this is a pipe dream.<p>Take even any native app in a webview, the performance are abysmal. Not because of the web tech itself, if these apps were written in plain JS/DOM, I'm sure they would run fine, but because developers chose to use complicated technologies with terrible performances on mobile, such as React. React is fine on desktop, React is not fine at all on mobile, unless one has access to $500+ handsets, which already discriminates against a significant audience, but developers won't test performances on low cost handsets at first place.
Off topic but does anyone know what static site generator was used for <a href="https://open-web-advocacy.org" rel="nofollow">https://open-web-advocacy.org</a> ?
> Economists call this the monopsony problem (or, since we're talking about two companies, a duopsony or oligopsony problem). That's an unwieldy and esoteric term, so Rebecca Giblin and I coined a much better one, and wrote a book about it: Chokepoint Capitalism:<p>In Soviet Russia, where economics was interesting, terms like "monopsony" or "oligopoly" were known to (many) schoolkids. I'd still prefer them than this vague novelty.
Web apps could, potentially, de-monopolize mobile devices. But what's the point? These devices are generally considered disposable. Most consumers (approximately all of them, in fact, aside from a few hard-core OSS and hardware hacker types) don't see any negative impact from these "monopolies".<p>Aside from that web app technology is of poor quality in almost every important domain: architecture, efficiency, stability and security. "Native" mobile apps have overlapping problems in these domains, too, but web apps are generally going to be strictly worse. No thanks.