As the App Store’s locked backyard comes under increasing threat in its current model, a handful of developers have launched a project called Open Web Advocacy. He wants to provide legislators and regulatory authorities with technical details that will help them understand current issues and allow the preservation of an open Web.
A technical article, titled Bringing Competition to Walled Gardens, will also aim to summarize the positions of the OWA and provide understandable technical arguments both to British regulators, where this project was born, and elsewhere in the world. Its founders even appeal to the goodwill of netizens to help them contact the legislators concerned… Big changes always need mass mobilization.
Two-speed browsers
According to them, the risk is to lose an essential freedom which has supported the development of the Web until now. This is “the entire future of app creation is at stake”, they explain on their website, as well as the distribution of these apps. The web is actually a space where an app can be “universal, free and open, written once and deployed everywhere”.
However, without change, they continue, “proprietary ecosystems and gatekeepers » (as giants like Apple and Google are sometimes called, editor’s note) will be able to “keep under their control and reduce innovation for mobile apps for many years to come”.
To tackle this problem, the developers of theOpen Web Advocacy (OWA) start by asking two things of Apple. The first that third-party browsers on iOS can access the same advanced features as Safari, for example the integration of Apple Pay, or the possibility for these browsers add a Web App to the iOS interface. The second is the authorization, by Apple, of engines other than WebKit on iOS.
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Safari, and technical “clones”
Indeed, for now, all browsers available on Apple’s mobile OS are based on the same technical basis, controlled by Apple. Opening this door would allow Firefox, Chrome and other browsers that rely on Chromium to use their own rendering engine, thus opening the door to technical competition and more flexibility.
This question of the tight control of the browser of iOS arises again with great acuity. Indeed, as part of the defense of its App Store, Apple regularly indicates that Web Apps are relevant alternatives to native applications.
However, many developers regret that Apple is slow to integrate technological innovations from the Web into its browser, thus blocking certain functionalities and preventing certain uses. We think in particular of the lack of support for NFC web technology, among many others.
The vital need for an open and free Web
So there is a real challenge in opening iOS to other browsers or improving WebKit faster.
In May 2021, Alex Russell, historical developer of Chrome and then in charge of Google’s Fugu project, was already worried about ecosystems that were too tightly controlled, in particular that of Apple’s App Store. He also pointed to the hand put on WebKit and the browsers available on iOS. He deeply regretted that Apple was holding back innovation, and slowing down the Web. For him, “Progress delayed is progress lost”.
Obviously, one could judge this biased speech, since formulated at the time by a Google employee. Nevertheless, this position is not far from the observation made by Mark Mayo in 2017. Then senior vice-president in charge of Firefox within the Mozilla Foundation, he told us of his regret for not having understood the changes what smartphones would bring with their App Store. He then blamed himself for having somehow betrayed the free Web.
Five years later, the Web is still battered by the closed spaces of native applications distributed by App Stores. The developers behind theOpen Web Advocacy are there to remind us, and to try in turn to change things, with our help…
Source: The Register