My debut album is out, featuring 10 songs written while I was living in Thailand, India and Turkey. It’s quite a jumble of genres, as I like lots of different types of music, and not everyone will like it – I write the songs I want to hear, not for other people’s appetites.
You can buy it on Bandcamp for £2 or more, or (if you’re a cheapskate) you can stream it on Spotify or Apple Music. I am available for autographing breasts or buttocks.
Wow, 300 Reading Lists!
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (part of US Dept of Commerce) Mobile App Competition Report came out yesterday (1 Feb). Along with fellow Open Web Advocacy chums, I briefed them and also personally commented.
Consumers largely can’t get apps outside of the app store model, controlled by Apple and Google. This means innovators have very limited avenues for reaching consumers.
Apple and Google create hurdles for developers to compete for consumers by imposing technical limits, such as restricting how apps can function or requiring developers to go through slow and opaque review processes.
I’m very glad that, like other regulators, we’ve helped them understand that there’s not a binary choice between single-platform iOS and Android “native” apps, but Web Apps (AKA “PWA”, Progressive Web Apps) offer a cheaper to produce alternative, as they use universal, mature web technologies:
Web apps can be optimized for design, with artfully crafted animations and widgets; they can also be optimized for unique connectivity constraints, offering users either a download-as-you go experience for low-bandwidth environments, or an offline mode if needed.
However, the mobile duopoly restrict the installation of web apps, favouring their own default browsers:
commenters contend that the major mobile operating system platforms—both of which derive revenue from native app downloads through their mobile app stores & whose own browsers derive significant advertising revenue—have acted to stifle implementation & distribution of web apps
NTIA recognises that this is a deliberate choice by Apple and (to a lesser extent) by Google:
developers face significant hurdles to get a chance to compete for users in the ecosystem, and these hurdles are due to corporate choices rather than technical necessities
NTIA explicitly calls out the Apple Browser Ban:
any web browser downloaded from Apple’s mobile app store runs on WebKit. This means that the browsers that users recognize elsewhere—on Android and on desktop computers—do not have the same functionality that they do on those other platforms.
It notes that WebKit has implemented fewer features that allow Web Apps to have similar capabilities as its iOS single-platform Apps, and lists some of the most important with the dates they were available in Gecko and Blink, continuing
According to commenters, lack of support for these features would be a more acceptable condition if Apple allowed other, more robust, and full-featured browser engines on its operating system. Then, iOS users would be free to choose between Safari’s less feature-rich experience (which might have other benefits, such as privacy and security features), and the broader capabilities of competing browsers (which might have other borrowers costs, such as greater drain on system resources and need to adjust more settings). Instead, iOS users are never given the opportunity to choose meaningfully differentiated browsers and experience features that are common for Android users—some of which have been available for over a decade.
Regardless of Apple’s claims that the Apple Browser Ban is to protect their users,
Multiple commenters note that the only obvious beneficiary of Apple’s WebKit restrictions is Apple itself, which derives significant revenue from its mobile app store commissions
The report concludes that
Congress should enact laws and relevant agencies should consider measures [aimed at] Getting platforms to allow installation and full functionality of third-party web browsers. To allow web browsers to be competitive, as discussed above, the platforms would need to allow installation and full functionality of the third-party web browsers. This would require platforms to permit third-party browsers a comparable level of integration with device and operating system functionality. As with other measures, it would be important to construct this to allow platform providers to implement reasonable restrictions in order to protect user privacy, security, and safety.
The NTIA joins the Australian, EU, and UK regulators in suggesting that the Apple Browser Ban stifles competition and must be curtailed.
The question now is whether Apple will do the right thing, or seek to hurl lawyers with procedural arguments at it instead, as they’re doing in the UK now. It’s rumoured that Apple might be contemplating about thinking about speculating about considering opening up iOS to alternate browsers for when the EU Digital Markets Act comes into force in 2024. But for every month they delay, they earn a fortune; it’s estimated that Google pays Apple $20 Billion to be the default search engine in Safari, and the App Store earned Apple $72.3 Billion in 2020 – sums which easily pay for snazzy lawyers, iPads for influencers, salaries for Safari shills, and Kool Aid for WebKit wafflers.
Place your bets!
Regular readers to this chucklefest will recall that I’ve been involved with briefing competition regulators in UK, US, Australia, Japan and EU about the Apple Browser Ban – Apple’s anti-competitive requirement that anything that can browse the web on iOS/iPad must use its WebKit engine. This allows Apple to stop web apps becoming as feature-rich as its iOS apps, for which it can charge a massive fee for listing in its monopoly App Store.
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority recently announced a market investigation reference (MIR) into the markets for mobile browsers (particularly browser engines). The CMA may decide to make a MIR when it has reasonable grounds for suspecting that a feature or combination of features of a market or markets in the UK prevents, restricts, or distorts competition (PDF).
You would imagine that Apple would welcome this opportunity to be scrutinised, given that Apple told CMA (PDF) that
By integrating WebKit into iOS, Apple is able to guarantee robust user privacy protections for every browsing experience on iOS device… . WebKit has also been carefully designed and optimized for use on iOS devices. This allows iOS devices to outperform competitors on web-based browsing benchmarks… Mandating Apple to allow apps to use third-party rendering engines on iOS, as proposed by the IR, would break the integrated security model of iOS devices, reduce their privacy and performance, and ultimately harm competition between iOS and Android devices.
Yet despite Apple’s assertion that it is simply the best, better than all the rest, it is weirdly reluctant to see the CMA investigate it. You would assume that Apple are confident that it would be vindicated by CMA as better than anyone, anyone they’ve ever met. Yet Apple applied to the Competition Appeal Tribunal (PDF, of course), seeking
1. An Order that the MIR Decision is quashed.
2. A declaration that the MIR Decision and market investigation purportedly launched by
reference to it are invalid and of no legal effect.
In its Notice of Application, Apple also seeks interim relief in the form of a stay of the market investigation pending determination of the application.
Why would this be? I don’t know (I seem no longer to be on not-Steve’s Xmas card list). But it’s interesting to note that a CMA Market Investigation can have real teeth. It has previously forced forced the sale of airports and hospitals (gosh! A PDF) in other sectors.
A market investigation lowers the hurdle for the CMA: it doesn’t have to prove wrongdoing, just adverse effects on competition (abbreviated as AEC, which in other antitrust jurisdictions, however, stands for “as efficient competitor”) and has greater powers to impose remedies. Otherwise a conventional antitrust investigation of Apple’s conduct would be required, and Apple would have to be shown to have abused a dominant position in the relevant market. Apple would like to deprive the CMA of its more powerful tool, and essentially argues that the CMA has deprived itself of that tool by failing to abide by the applicable statute.
It’s rumoured that Apple might be contemplating about thinking about speculating about considering opening up iOS to alternate browsers for when the EU Digital Markets Act comes into force in 2024. But for every month they delay, they earn a fortune; it’s estimated that Google pays Apple $20 Billion to be the default search engine in Safari, and the App Store earned Apple $72.3 Billion in 2020 – sums which easily pay for snazzy lawyers, iPads for influencers, salaries for Safari shills, and Kool Aid for WebKit wafflers.
Due to annoyances in the economy (thanks, Putin, and Liz Truss) I find myself once again on the jobs market. Read my LinkTin C.V. thingie, then hire me to make your digital products more accessible, faster and full of standardsy goodness!
In March, I shall be keynoting at axe-con with a talk called Whose web is it, anyway?. It’s free.
What is “accessibility”? For some, it’s about ensuring that your sites and apps don’t block people with disabilities from completing tasks. That’s the main part of it, but in my opinion it’s not all of the story. Accessibility, to me, means taking care to develop digital services that are inclusive as possible. That means inclusive of people with disabilities, of people outside Euro-centric cultures, and people who don’t have expensive, top-the-range hardware and always-on cheap fast networks.
In his closely argued post The Performance Inequality Gap, 2023, Alex Russell notes that “When digital is society’s default, slow is exclusionary”, and continues
sites continue to send more script than is reasonable for 80+% of the world’s users, widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots. This is an ethical crisis for the frontend.
Big Al goes on to suggest that in order to reach interactivity in less than 5 seconds on first load, we should send no more that ~150KiB of HTML, CSS, images, and render-blocking font resources, and no more than ~300-350KiB of JavaScript. (If you want to know the reasoning behind this, Alex meticulously cites his sources in the article; read it!)
Now, I’m not saying this is impossible using modern frameworks and tooling (React, Next.js etc) that optimise for good “developer experience”. But it is a damned sight harder, because such tooling prioritises developer experience over user experience.
In January, I’ll be back on the jobs market (here’s my LinkTin resumé!) so I’ve been looking at what’s available. Today I saw a job for a Front End lead who will “write the first lines of front end code and set the tone for how the team approaches user-facing software development”. The job spec requires a “bias towards solving problems in simple, elegant ways”, and the candidate should be “confident building with…reliability and accessibility in mind”. Yet, weirdly, even though the first lines of code are yet to be written, it seems the tech stack is already decided upon: React and Next.js.
As Alex’s post shows, such tooling conspires against simplicity and elegance, and certainly against reliability and accessibility. To repeat his message:
When digital is society’s default, slow is exclusionary
Bad performance is bad accessibility.
I wrote a couple of short blog posts for Open Web Advocacy (of which I’m a founder member) on our progress in getting regulators to overturn the iOS browser ban and end Apple’s stranglehold over the use of Progressive Web Apps on iThings.
TL:DR; we’re winning.
Here’s a YouTube video of a talk I gave for the nerdearla conference, with Spanish subtitles. Basically, it’s about Safari being “the new IE”, and what we at Open Web Advocacy are doing to try to end Apple’s browser ban on iOS and iPads, so consumers can use a more capable browser, and developers can deliver non-hamstrung Progressive Web Apps to iThing users.
Since I gave this talk, the UK Competition and Markets Authority have opened a market investigation into Apple’s iThings browser restriction – read News from UK and EU for more.