The whole Epic vs Apple was about Apple blocking this. Before being slapped by regulators, Apple had anti-steering policies forbidding iOS apps from even mentioning that purchasing elsewhere is possible.
Even after EU DSA told them to allow purchases via Web, Apple literally demanded a 27% cut from purchases happening outside of App Store (and then a bunch of other arrogantly greedy fee structures that keeps them in courts).
Apple knows how hard is not to be in the duopoly of app stores. They keep web apps half-assed, won't direct users to them, but allow knock-off apps to use your trademarks in their search keywords.
They do and it’s awful. I’m making a browser based game and it works great on desktop browsers but Apple refuses to allow css filters on canvas forcing you to build your own filters and apply them to image data. The web audio api is also a pain to get working properly on iOS safari and a bunch of other arbitrary but feels like they’re intentional obstacles found only on iOS. I’m almost considering just using webgl instead of a 2d context but who knows what obstacles apple is hiding there also it will make everything so much more verbose for no real gain.
Not even in the days of IE was I ever this frustrated.
> Not even in the days of IE was I ever this frustrated.
I've been web devving since the days of IE as well and this reeks of hyperbole. Maybe things are different for browser games, but for me, everything has vastly improved since those days.
Well maybe we are doing different things. Back in those days Javascript and CSS were much simpler people would cry about the position of elements and easy stuff like that. However I have to manually manage web audio api memory because if you don't release the buffers and other things the memory won't get released until the tab in closed, so it's easy for a tab to inexpertly take up 6gigs plus of ram (1min of audio is ~80mb), it's impossible to know that, that is happening unless you know, so you have this missive memory leak that even refreshing the tab won't fix and you have no idea why it happening, that is true frustration. You have to manage memory in canvas too especially if you are using bitmaps and if you are on iOS because it will crash the page because you looked at it wrong. I don't know anything that would have crashed the page in IE back in the day. So no, it is not hyperbole :)
Sorry, I shouldn't comment before I have my coffee. Saying it "reeks of hyperbole" was unnecessarily rude.
That does sound frustrating. You're working with APIs that I don't usually touch (audio, canvas) so it's not surprising that I haven't experienced that. I was thinking back to the days I had to support IE 8, trying to debug weird issues in production like scripts not working because `console.log` wasn't defined unless the developer tools were opened.
To be fair, he's completely right. I have a lot of experience with IE6 and safari on iOS, and while IE6 was bad and did weird shit, Safari is much worse. It's amazing that things can work in any browser, without ever even thinking about it, but then on Safari you get weird behaviour, straight up rendering bugs because of some weird race conditions with the engine or even crashes.
The latest issue that I've noticed yesterday is the button nav bar on the screen when running PWAs. The button is over the bottom navbar of the PWA, and despite apple themselves coming up with the API to inform the browser about safe display areas, it doesn't work in PWAs on iOS. PWA mode on iOS != non PWA on iOS. They often behave completely different and you often have to use JS for basic things to work, like clicking a link(yup, this was a thing for years).
I tried something similar a couple years back, and fully agree. Safari is atrocious for trying to create a good mobile experience. It almost feels intentional.
Due to the web's distributed nature, "all" is impossible, but there are plenty of ranked-by-rating lists of web games out there. I don't want to be spammy so I'm only gonna link one of them that comes to mind, but there are a lot of other listings you can find at any search engine of your choice!
(All is impossible for both iOS and Android also: Games that don't get updated, games that get unlisted due to having a link to their own website with the wrong phrasing next to it, games that get unlisted due to the app store owner not being satisfied with the description page for the game, regional restrictions, requests from governments to remove socially unacceptable apps, etc)
My point was that the web has orders of magnitude worse discoverability than the stores, otherwise everyone would obviously just publish on the web.
Saying "oh just do the thing you aren't doing" shows that one of two things is true: Either every app developer currently doesn't know the web exists, or everyone else knows something you don't.
Your point doesn't make any sense. The only reason Apple's store can have "all" the apps is that they are a monopolist and take steps to disallow anyone from selling apps through any other channel, so there cannot possibly be multiple storefronts with different selections like their is in any other context.
On Android for example, Play Store does not have "all" apps, or even most apps that I have on my phone. Because Play Store has mostly garbage. It's a surprise to no one that Steam's storefront has a different selection from Amazon or Epic or GoG in the same way that no one is surprised that Walmart and Target carry different items.
So "discovery" in your sense is basically "I ignore everything that isn't presented by this particular storefront", i.e. a complete lack of discovery.
If you think "the web has orders of magnitude worse discoverability than mobile app stores" makes no sense, then there's not enough common ground for us to have a productive discussion on this.
Apple doesn't have some special magic "discoverability"; they just prevent any other stores from being able to compete with them. Actually, searching for the iOS app store, I get:
which has no obvious way to even browse or search apps? How am I supposed to see what's available? I need to buy an expensive phone before I can even see what it can run? This is more discoverable? The bottom nav bar entry for "App Store" just takes me to the same page. If I click on "Store" it just shows me hardware; no apps. Where's the store and how am I supposed to find it? Do I need to physically go into an Apple store and use a phone there to browse?
I'm aware of your point. I disagree with it. A lot of companies seemingly have found it viable to have first-class web apps as part of their lineup; Off the top of my head: Uber and Uber Eats, KFC, Patreon, (And every single competitor to Patreon), every single mini-app in China (where discoverability is much higher), etc etc.
There are more app-having companies that have web apps than not
The original point wasn't that it's viable to also have a web app, but whether it's viable to only have a web app. How many of the companies you mentioned don't have mobile apps at all?
Of the patreon alternatives (dependent on content), Substack, X, Youtube, BuyMeACoffee, all have fan-side apps. kofi, Fourthwall, Squarespace, all the NSFW-centric alternatives, do not.
Of the mini-apps in China, I don't know, I was never exposed to the existence of their non-mini-app counterparts.
This rethoric is destructive and threatens society and democracy alike. Apple is not just some company that you can just opt out of, if you're working in a certain field. Just like you can't opt out to YouTube if you're a content creator.
It not like an email service where you can just switch from Gmail to fastmail to proton or to any of the other dozens of big email providers.
Because they don't control those. Apple could choose to only allow users to access websites that pay them a bit 30% fee, but users would notice the web was turned off on their device. They don't notice when the app store does it.
Until a court order stopped them, Apple was collecting a 27% tax on certain external payments even though they didn't control the payment rails. They required developers to report their external payment revenue and sent them invoices. Developers had to commit to that or their apps would be rejected for having external payments.
It's at least "reasonable" that if the app was where users derived usage, and would've purchased thru the app but for the external purchasing option, then apple has a case for it.
However, there's no such case for web (as in, web _only_).
If usage of an app gives Apple some justification for taxing payments, by similar logic would usage of the iPhone itself, and Safari, give them a similar some justification?
"The user would have used our payment rails had there not been other options" seems to apply universally; Apple could say the same thing about website owners steering users away from some expensive "Apple web pay" option.
I think the difference is just leverage. Apple isn't curating what websites iOS users are allowed to visit (yet...), so they can't tell website owners "pay up or we'll block you".
I don't think people would notice if Apple just made the website behind a paywall. Most people are not going to be aware that they can access the same content without paying a fee to Apple. They may only even have an Apple device to access the internet, so they'd just see it as normal
Apple cannot charge for that. However, apple does attempt to gimp the web platforms on mobile to "subtly" push for apps.