[nickspag]

I think you're giving the author too much credit. They recently chimed in on Twitter in a similar context- which I'm guessing is where the motivation for this blog post originates. And despite having a WebKit engineer publicly discuss design decisions and reasoning, they ignore them during that discussion and go on to write this article while making note of literally none of the context that was provided? https://twitter.com/johnwilander/status/1191185213012865025.

It's bad faith commentary, to say the least. Look at the level of accusation they're making "Apple Is Trying to Kill Web Technology" ... "It wants its Mac App Store to be filled with apps that you can’t find anywhere else." Leaving aside the fact that there's no way Apple makes enough from some imaginary exclusivity to justify trying to "kill web technology," none of their moves can even rise to that level. So they were slow to implement WebRTC? Service Workers? Both have massive privacy issues- and partitioning service workers out of process is the crux of how WebKit enforce's privacy- which they're pushing even harder these days. And according to said engineer they even added a compile flag so Google didn't have to use partitioning (I wonder why they wanted that...)- how very anti competitive of Apple. And suddenly mandatory WebKit on iOS is a "monopoly?" It's their platform- they define the security and privacy baselines. Apple has had a walled garden since before the "Web Technology" the author is referring to existed and this is a piece of that. It's another valid consumer selling point- their stores aren't cluttered with trash and I know what those apps can access. But, according to this person, every single point here is fake marketing speak because... checks notes... they want to force people to develop apps only for the Mac Store? Really?

We can be critical of Apple for a lot of web stuff, but it takes a delusional level of self-absorbance to think that Apple is bringing about the end of cross platform web tech because they put up a completely fair and valid barrier, that will probably be resolved shortly, as you said, on one's tech stack of choice.

[dannyw]

Reading the attached twitter thread, I do believe the author is engaged in a bad faith argument.

WebKit engineers provided very reasonable arguments for why WebRTC and service workers took a while to build and diverges from the spec: privacy.

[w1nst0nsm1th]

Mac AppStore and AppStore are literally filled with complete junk which has either not been updated in 3 years and crashes at every use cases or is just plain cheap trashware compiled and submitted by automated way and cloned again and again from template app in the first place.

Obtaining a refund for any purchase is furthermore a pain in the ass with no obvious or publicly available way without having to search the web so you just let it go instead of wasting your time in the process or just because the 24h grace period to do it just expired because you were in a hurry and didn't have time to scrap for a still relevant process on google.

Reporting scaming app with dark pattern is even worse with no direct access to Apple to do so and you end up giving up in the process because it's such a waste of time to report on just a kind of user forum with its own dark pattern or bugs which prevent you to do so and with no sign of Apple being in charge anyway.

AppStore and Mac AppStore are a disgrace which make it hard to justify their 30% ripoff on app price. In fact, they are just as happy you paid 8€/15€ for useless crap as they still have their share of the bargain in the process.

Time cook Apple is now just a rippoff of consumer money at every possible corner filled with dark pattern and thrown-away super cost-optimized flawed hardware working at the edge... And wait till notarization require you to pay an Apple tax and there is no way anymore to "sideload" an app without having to jailbreak your Mac, as it is the case with iOS.