It's not as if it's the first time Apple does it either. They positioned OS X as the best platform to run Java, yet ditched it a couple of years later. Even back then, people were complaining about it [0].
Developing on Mac has always been a chore (at least back in the XCode 1.1 and 2.0 days), with poorly documented APIs and APIs that are just flat out broken (OpenGL comes to mind, and is still broken to this day apparently).
Our running joke back then was that "Macs are very user friendly, except developers don't count as users." Still true to this day apparently.
Which has been stated again and again, but was never an issue with Apple.
First because what they make from the App Store is spare change for them.
Second because they did have the best browser for a while, and did very much to advance the state of the art (from WebSQL, to Canvas, CSS 3D and other stuff, all originating there, along with the original fast-JITed JS engine who started the JS-race to what we have know). And they did that for years after they had an App platform available too.
Curious where you are basing your revenue numbers from. Per Apple's reported statistics for 2014[1], developers pulled in $10 billion dollars in revenue from the app store. That means that Apple's revenue from the app store should also be in the low billions (based on the 70/30 cut they take from app store sales and purchases).
All without manufacturing logistics and hardware production costs. Obviously the computing infrastructure, payment processing and software engineering of the app store has a cost, but I'd imagine much less than those involved with building, distributing and selling a computer or mobile device.
It may not generate as much as hardware sales do, but billions of dollars hardly seems like spare change.
>That means that Apple's revenue from the app store should also be in the low billions (based on the 70/30 cut they take from app store sales and purchases).
That makes it around $3 billion, before taxes and infrastructure expenses, payment deals, etc.
$3 billion is spare change for Apple. They have 200 times than in cash.
Again you post information without any sources. A more accurate figure is $178 billion in cash at the beginning of this year.[1] That means they have around 59 times more than that amount in cash, not the 200 you claimed. Also, I think its telling that Apple themselves mentioned App Store Sales as a main factor in their revenue earnings for Q4 of their 2014 fiscal year. [2] What's important is how much of their total annual revenue and profits are derived from App Store sales, not how it compares to the amount of cash they have on hand.
As others have mentioned, there are other benefits from native applications, like vendor lock-in, which Apple isn't going to get with web-based applications.
>That means they have around 59 times more than that amount in cash, not the 200 you claimed
Still, same order of magnitude, and still many times over their app profit.
>Also, I think its telling that Apple themselves mentioned App Store Sales as a main factor in their revenue earnings for Q4 of their 2014 fiscal year.
I don't see how you can justify being off on your facts by 3-4 times by saying its still in the same order of magnitude. You overestimated their cash on hand by about 422 billion dollars. Again, I see the cash on hand as a weak argument. What really matters is how much annual revenue and profit it brings in. Apple is going to be concerned about anything that adds or takes away from their revenue in a significant way.
Its telling that App Store sales are a significant source of revenue for Apple. One that could possibly justify not making improvements to Safari that could make it better compete with native applications.
Not much lock-in. Most apps are either cross platform or for casual use, and I could buy an Android phone and be productive tomorrow, transferring all my images, documents, contacts and such in a couple of hours.
People don't feel locked with their app purchases. Case in point, the large volumes of people going from Android to iOS and vice versa.
Apple wants to make the best experience for users because then they'll keep buying Apple products. If users want the web, then they make the browser better. If Apps are more appropriate, then they make apps better.
Apple prioritizes stuff users care about -- battery life > IndexedDB, accessibility > WebGL.
Until you understand this and stop thinking like a conspiracy theorist, you won't understand Apple and will keep confusing your priorities with user priorities.
Again: pleasing users -> profit. Making web lose -> ???
This isn't "embrace and extend" -- Microsoft added huge swathes of proprietary functionality to IE and tended (and tends) to prioritize developer and corporate IT desires over users. Insofar as Apple extends the browser, they do it through standards and proposed standards and (mostly) open source the implementations.
Apple wants to make the best experience for users while maintaining vendor lock-in.
iOS users invest hundreds of dollars in apps and games and enjoy exclusive products. This creates a very significant barrier to switch to another mobile platform.
Quite obviously increased switching costs for users are important for iOS to maintain leadership in platform wars.
Therefore, rapid advancement of web apps user experience to the level of native apps in some categories would be detrimental to Apple's competitive positions.
Making web lose -> stronger competitive advantage.
Making web lose -> make users unhappy in short (and probably long) term, damage Apple's reputation in long term
It's totally awesome how Google created its Play store so that it seamlessly works on competing platforms -- after all it's a largely open-source stack that would easily run on (say) iPhones. No wait, they use it as a bludgeon to keep third parties in line (and create vendor lock-in).
> Making web lose -> make users unhappy in short term
Sure, it decreases user satisfaction for a SUBSET of users, who care about web apps. This subset seems to be strategically negligible for Apple. This is a trade-off which is absolutely rational from the shareholders/management perspective.
>It's totally awesome how Google created its Play store so that it seamlessly works on competing platforms
Your fanboyism shows. This thread is not about Google, also a corporation which actions are driven by interests of management and shareholders.
But that argument can justify any deficiency in Safari, so it's unconvincing. Eventually you're just saying, "Apple don't care about all these new web things." Which is the point of TFA.
How so? Let's suppose Safari has some horrible bug in it that exposes users to malware or whatever. (And it has had from time to time and Apple has been rightly pilloried for some of these cases.) Tell me how saying that Apple would rather improve user experience than add developer-friendly features justifies this.
Different people will draw the line at different places. To you, the hypothetical malware vuln should be fixed before e.g. improving battery life by 5%. To some other user who is on a long plane journey without a power adapter and doesn't e.g. click on .flv links on specialty forums, maybe it shouldn't. But to a greedy fruit executive who wants the web to be insecure? There's no question! b^)
This thread explores the possibility that, for strategic reasons, new web stuff is not implemented on Safari. That proposition is scarcely undermined by hypothesizing a typical user who doesn't care about new web stuff as much as she cares about battery life. She's hypothetical, why should she care about anything as much as she cares about battery life?
Let's ignore the fact you didn't address my argument.
There are diminishing returns.
It's not like Apple has provided a web browser that basically doesn't work but has great battery life. Most people consider Safari to be the best mobile browsing experience there is. (I just googled to make sure I wasn't quoting outdated opinions and it's still true.)
Safari in 10.11 has added a feature which tells you which browser tab is making noise so you can close it. Just now I was so wishing for it (in Chrome -- which is my primary browser, since I'm a web developer). Shame on Apple for doing that and not fixing bugs in their IndexedDB implementation! (BTW those bugs are horrible -- how on earth could they pass the simplest unit tests? -- and really should be fixed.)
> To you, the hypothetical malware vuln should be fixed before e.g. improving battery life by 5%.
Apple doesn't let users decide what's best for them... that's one of the things that's different about the company. Want to customize your UI? Nope, that's silly, you can't have it. Apple would decide what's good for the user and it would probably consider browser vulnerabilities more important than some obscure new feature.
> But to a greedy fruit executive who wants the web to be insecure? There's no question!
Safari in 10.11 has added a feature which tells you which browser tab is making noise so you can close it. Just now I was so wishing for it (in Chrome -- which is my primary browser, since I'm a web developer).
That's great -- I didn't know because chrome doesn't display those things if the tab is narrower than the caption, and I usually have a lot of tabs open. Argh!
(Especially with the trend to wide-screens, the placement of tabs on the top vs. the left side seems to me to be a gigantic misstep on everyone's part)
Not trolling -- just ignorant. (And the implementation is kind of flawed. Sufficiently flawed that I've never seen one of the icons. I wonder if Safari's is any better -- can't be bothered installing the beta.)
Not a big fan of your "b^)" emoticon -- doesn't look like anything to me, and doesn't show up in lists of common emoticons. But OK your most outrageous comment was in jest; fair enough.
I have only one eye and wear a patch over my right socket. Also I have a pointy nose. A friend of mine suggested that smiley a long time ago, and I've used it since.
If Apple really wanted to make Web Apps feel like a second class citizen, they wouldn't be adding Force Touch, custom AirPlay control support and Picture In Picture support to the upcoming version of Safari. Those are deep, native app level features that aren't even Web standards yet.
I assume Apple is underinvesting in safari simply because they have bigger fish to fry, and they are notoriously understaffed with competent engineers (or have bad project management).
They're adding APIs that only benefit people using their hardware. Unless they open source AirPlay and whatever else they need to do for Force Touch I'm failing to see why I should be excited by that.
