[joev_]

> Apple wants to relegate websites to second-class status on their popular computers, and exercises viewpoint censorship on what “apps” they allow in their “app store”.

I don't remember it that way all. Does anyone else? From what I remember, there was a very heavy consumer demand for the App store, meanwhile Apple was telling everyone just to make web apps. They actively developed WebKit into a cutting-edge, standards-oriented, developer-friendly browser. I don't see how you could say they wanted to "relegate websites to second-class status".

[kragen]

Originally Apple did tell everyone just to make web apps. Renegade hackers made native apps for iOS anyway, creating consumer demand, and Apple relented. All this happened before I wrote that message in 2011. By 2011 webapps were already second-class. (Not as second-class as they are on Android, though!)

[zmmmmm]

That seems to me now like it was just a ruse to buy them time. They went on to hamstrung the browser from attaining native performance and never added all the direct hardware features you could get at with apps - which is what they would have done if they really intended the browser to be an app platform.

[IkmoIkmo]

Yeah that was when the Iphone was first released in 2007, continued for a while. But by 2011, the app store was already becoming a behemoth, a huge source of profits for Apple, an effective content-curating tool and a close Apple-unique marketplace that they could compare to the Playstore and say 'we've got more and better content, get an iOS device'.

In other words, by 2011 nobody at Apple was telling developers 'web apps instead of native please'.

Meanwhile, in the past years they did effectively cut things like WebGL on iOS because it was a threat to native app performance in the browser. (iOS 8 finally, long overdue, changed this, now that the app store is there to stay.) Or say blocking Nitro on anything but Safari, say Chrome, not a problem for regular websites, but a problem for JS heavy web apps.

[sneak]

Websites can't send notifications on iOS, for one. (They can on Mavericks and Yosemite.)

[0942v8653]

That's a design/ideology conflict and not something that can be fixed. On OS X, you can leave a webpage open, and it must be open in order for the notifications to be sent. On iOS, you cannot (terminated whenever there is memory pressure). Push notifications are just way beyond what a website should be able to do, and scheduled ones aren't really all that useful except for a handful of apps.