Bruce Lawson's personal site

Regular readers will recall that the UK competition regulator, CMA, investigated Apple and Google’s mobile ecosystems and concluded there is a need for regulation. Although they were initially looking mostly at native app stores, but quickly widened that to looking at how Apple’s insistence on all browsers using WebKit on iOS is preventing Progressive Web Apps from competing against single platform native apps.

CMA has announced its intention to being a market investigation specifically into the supply of mobile browsers and browser engines, and the distribution of cloud gaming services through app stores on mobile devices, and seeks your views. It doesn’t matter whether you are not based in UK; if you or your clients do business in UK, your views matter too.

Steve Fenton has published his response, as has Alistair Shepherd; here is mine, in case you need something to crib from to write yours. Send your response to the CMA mailbox browsersandcloud@cma.gov.uk before July 22nd.

I am a UK-based web developer and accessibility consultant, specialising in ensuring web sites are inclusive for people with disabilities or who experience other barriers to access�such as living in poorer nations where mobile data is comparatively expensive, networks may be slow and unreliable and people are generally accessing the web on cheap, lower-specification devices. I write in a personal capacity, and am not speaking on behalf of any clients or employers, past or present. You have my permission to publish or quote from this document, with or without attribution.

Many of my clients would like to make apps that are Progressive Web Applications. These are apps that are websites, built with long-established open technologies that work across all operating systems and devices, and enhanced to be able to work offline and have the look and feel of an application. Examples of ��look and feel’ might be to render full-screen; to be saved with their own icon onto a device’s home screen; to integrate with the device’s underlying platform (with the user’s permission) in order to capture images from the camera; use the microphone for video conferencing; to send push notifications to the user.

The benefits of PWAs are advantageous to both the developer (and the business they work for) and the end user. Because they are based on web technology, a competent developer need only make one app that will work on iOS, Android, as well as desktop computers and tablets. This write-once approach has obvious benefits over developing a single-platform (“native��) app for iOS in addition to a single-platform app for Android and also a website. It greatly reduces costs because it greatly reduces complexity of development, testing and deploying.

The benefits to the user are that the initial download is much smaller than that for a single-platform app from an app store. When an update to the web app is pushed by a developer to the server, the user only downloads the updated pages, not the whole application. For businesses looking to reach customers in growing markets such as India, Indonesia, Nigeria and Kenya, this is a competitive advantage.

In the case of users with accessibility needs due to a disability, the web is a mature platform on which accessibility is a solved problem.

However, many businesses are not able to offer a Progressive Web App, largely due to Apple’s anti-competitive policy of requiring all browsers on iOS and iPad to use its own engine, called WebKit. Whereas Google Chrome on Mac, Windows and Android uses its own engine (called Blink), and Firefox on non-iOS/iPad platforms uses its own rendering engine (called Gecko), Apple’s policy requires Firefox and Chrome on iOS/iPad to be branded skins over WebKit.

This “Apple browser ban�� has the unfortunate effect of ham-stringing Progressive Web Apps. Whereas Apple’s Safari browser allows web apps (such as Wordle) to be saved to the user’s home screen, Firefox and Chrome cannot do so�even though they all use WebKit. While single-platform iOS apps can send push notifications to the user, browsers are not permitted to. Push notifications are high on business’ priority because of how it can drive engagement. WebKit is also notably buggy and, with no competition on the iOS/iPad platform, there is little to incentivise Apple to invest more in its development.

Apple’s original vision for applications on iOS was Web Apps, and today they still claim Web Apps are a viable alternative to the App Store. Apple CEO Tim Cook made a similar claim last year in Congressional testimony when he suggested the web offers a viable alternative distribution channel to the iOS App Store. They have also claimed this during a court case in Australia with Epic.

Yet Apple’s own policies prevent Progressive Web Apps being a viable alternative. It’s time to regulate Apple into allowing other browser engines onto iOS/iPad and giving them full access to the underlying platform�just as they currently are on Apple’s MacOS, Android, Windows and Linux. Therefore, I fully support your proposal to make a reference in relation to the supply of mobile browsers and cloud gaming in the UK, the terms of reference, and urge a swift remedy: Apple must be required to allow alternate browser engines on iOS, with access to all of the same APIs and device integrations that Safari and Native iOS have access to.

Yours,

Bruce Lawson

Recently, the HTML spec changed to replace current outline algorithm with one based on heading levels. So the idea that you could use <h1> for a generic heading across your documents, and the browser would “know” which level it actually should be by its nesting inside <section> and other related “sectioning elements”, is no more.

This has caused a bit of anguish in my Twitter timeline�why has this excellent method of making reusable components been taken away? Won’t that hurt accessibility as documents marked up that way will now have a completely flat structure? We know that 85.7% of screen reader users finding heading level useful.

Here comes the shocker: it has never worked. No web browser has implemented that outlining algorithm. If you used <h1> across your documents, it has always had a flat structure. Nothing has been taken away; this part of the spec has always been a wish, but has never been reality.

One of the reasons I liked having a W3C versioned specification for HTML is that it would reflect the reality of what browsers do on the date at the top of the spec. A living standard often includes things that aren’t yet implemented. And the worse thing about having zombie stuff in a spec is that lots of developers believe (in good faith) that it accurately reflects what’s implemented today.

So it’s good that this is removed from the WHATWG specification (now that the W3C specs are dead). I wish that you could use one generic heading everywhere, and its computed level were communicated to assistive technology. Back n 1991, Sir Uncle Timbo himself wrote

I would in fact prefer, instead of <H1>, <H2> etc for headings [those come from the AAP DTD] to have a nestable <SECTION>..</SECTION> element, and a generic <H>..</H> which at any level within the sections would produce the required level of heading.

But browsers vendors ignored both Sir Uncle Timbo, and me (the temerity!) and never implemented it, so removing this from the spec will actually improve accessibility.

(More detail and timeline in Adrian Roselli’s post There Is No Document Outline Algorithm.)