In the USA, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is requesting comments on competition in the mobile application ecosystem after Biden signed Executive Order 14036 on Promoting Competition in the American Economy:
today a small number of dominant internet platforms use their power to exclude market entrants, to extract monopoly profits, and to gather intimate personal information that they can exploit for their own advantage. Too many small businesses across the economy depend on those platforms and a few online marketplaces for their survival
NTIA is looking for “concrete and specific information as to what app developers, organizations, and device (i.e.,phones; tablets) users experience, and any potential challenges or barriers that limit app distribution or user adoption”. Written comments must be received on or before 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on May 23, 2022.
Several of its questions encompass Apple hamstringing Progressive Web Apps by requiring all iThing browsers use its own bundled WebKit framework, which has less power than Safari or single-platform iOS apps. Here are some of the questions:
How should web apps (browser-based) or other apps that operate on a mobile middleware layer be categorized?
What unique factors, including advantages and obstacles, are there generally for app development — especially start-ups — that are relevant for competition?
Are there studies or specific examples of the costs or advantages for app developers to build apps for either, or both, of the main operating systems, iOS and Android (which have different requirements)?
What other barriers (e.g.,legal, technical, market, pricing of interface access such as Application Programing Interfaces [APIs]) exist, if any, in fostering effective interoperability in this ecosystem?
How do policy decisions by firms that operate app stores, build operating systems, or design hardware impact app developers (e.g., terms of service for app developers)?
How do, or might, alternative app stores (other than Google Play or the Apple App Store), affect competition in the mobile app ecosystem?
What evidence is there to assess whether an app store model is necessary for mobile devices, instead of the general-purpose model used for desktop computing applications?
Is there evidence of legitimate apps being rejected from app stores or otherwise blocked from mobile devices? Is there evidence that this is a common occurrence or happens to significant numbers of apps?
Are there specific unnecessary (e.g., technical) constraints placed on this ability of app developers to make use of device capabilities, whether by device-makers, service providers or operating system providers, that impact competition?
I urge American developers to send comments to NTIA, whether you’re in favour of Apple allowing real browser choice on iOS by setting Safari free, or against it. You’re welcome to use Bringing Competition to Walled Gardens, our response to a similar investigation by the UK Competition and Markets Authority for inspiration/ cutting and pasting. Make your voice heard!
OMG let it be true: The leaked “final” version of the Digital Markets Act: A summary in ten points – “Article 5 point (e) has been expanded to capture instances where the gatekeeper requires business users to offer or interoperate with a web browser engine. This is most likely meant to address Apple’s policy of requiring all browsers running on iOS to utilize Apple’s WebKit browser engine”
Learn PWA – A course that breaks down every aspect of modern progressive web app development
CSS Parent Selector “In this article, I will explain the problem that :has solves, how it works, where and how we can use it with some use-cases and examples, and most importantly how we can use it today.”
Mobile data costs fall but as demand for internet services surges, progress remains too slow – “almost one billion people live in countries where basic internet access remains unaffordable. And even in countries where 1GB is priced at less than 2% of average monthly income, income inequality means that basic internet access will still be out of reach for many lower-earners.”
Designing for Children – “An evolving guide that aims to refine a new standard for both design and business to direct the development towards products and services that have ethics and children’s best interests at their core.”
Download icons, logos, and vector SVGs from any site SVG Gobbler is a browser extension that finds the vector content on the page you’re viewing and gives you the option to download, optimize, copy, view the code, or export it as an image.
Staybl is a browser for Parkinson’s patients, with “customizable tremor compensation tremor compensation, high-contrast design, a particularly legible font, and general ease of use.”
Warp – a new terminal written in Rust – looks very promising, with lots of useful features. Beta is free to download on Mac (other platforms coming)
Beanstalk cryptocurrency loses $182m of reserves in flash ‘attack’ – ‘Code is law’ cryptotwats lose $182m in a manoeuvre perfectly legal according to its own code, then go sobbing to the FBI. My Decentralised thoughts and Proof of Prayers are with them in this difficult time.
A Proposal For Type Syntax in JavaScript – “a set of syntax for types that engines would entirely ignore, but which tools like TypeScript, Flow, and others could use. This allows us to keep the things you love about TypeScript – its type-checking and editing experience – while removing the need for a build step in development.”
Carousels: No one likes you – “I would like to suggest an easy alternative to adding a carousel to your page. Are you ready? Think about the content on your page”
UA gotta be kidding – Brian Kardell on the history and lies of the humble UA string
The Infinite Exploitation Of Cryptocurrency – “code is law”, so an attacker took $600 million of cryptocurrency from the browser-based play-to-earn blockchain game Axie Infinity, in complete accordance with the contracts involved, because Sky Mavis (the developers) had allowed them to.
The Wall Street Journal indicated that many companies are looking for personnel with accessibility skills and that they can’t find them easily…The number of job listings with ‘accessibility’ in the title grew 78% in the year ending in July [2021] from the previous 12 months, LinkedIn said.
Get ahead! Crush, grind, mash and maim lesser developers! Earn more cash! You can acquire better “accessibility skills” than 90% of the developers on the market by
(The first two are foundational skills for anyone whose code is allowed anywhere near a web browser. The latter is a foundational skill for ‘being a decent human being’)
Interop 2022 is a really exciting collaboration between Igalia, Bocoup, Webkit, Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome to enhance interoperability between browsers. Yay! I want to snog all of them.
Are we live? – “If you have an interface where content is dynamically updated, and when the content is updated it does not receive focus, then you likely are going to need a live region.” Scott O’Hara does a deep dive into the fun quirks of live regions in real Assistive Tech.
Say Hello to selectmenu, a Fully Style-able select Element – Can’t wait to see this in browsers, given that 93.6% of React select components are literally vast lumps of carcinogenic walrus turds, forged in Mordor by Margaret Thatcher and Hitler.
What makes writing more readable? “An examination of translating text to make it as accessible as possible.” I found this fascinating, especially as each paragraph of the article has a translation next to it
Version 100 in Chrome and Firefox “Chrome and Firefox will reach version 100 in a couple of months. This has the potential to cause breakage on sites that rely on identifying the browser version to perform business logic. This post covers the timeline of events, the strategies that Chrome and Firefox are taking to mitigate the impact, and how you can help.”
PWA Haven – Really neat collection of utility apps, all implemented as PWAs and using powerful Project Fugu. “The goal is to have PWA’s replace as many simple native apps as possible” by ThaUnknown_
Browsing with assistive technology videos – EXCELLENT short videos (<5 mins) that show you how people using screen readers, keyboard-only, screen magnifiers etc use the web. And narrated ASMR-style by “Mr Mellifluous” Pattypoo Lauke
Going Dutch – The continuing saga of Apple’s conflict with the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) — the Dutch equivalent of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. By John Gruber, so expect some reality distortion field.
Using Google Fonts Breaches GDPR – “The Bavarian state court in Munich, Germany, on 20 January 2022, decided that using Google fonts in your site breaches the GDPR” (the linked version. Self-hosting doesn’t breach GDPR, and is better for performance by eliminating another DNS lookup)
Behavioral ad industry gets hard reform deadline after IAB’s TCF found to breach Europe’s GDPR – “the regulatory sanction prohibits behavioral advertisers from using the IAB’s so-called “Transparency and Consent Framework” (TCF) to bypass user consent by claiming legitimate interest as a legal base to track and profile web users.” I don’t know what IAB TCF is, but I bet it smells like bums.
No, Apple Did Not Crowdfund :focus-visible in Safari – Uncle Eric sets the record straight: “The addition of :focus-visible to WebKit was lead by the community, done by Igalia, and contributed to WebKit without any involvement from Apple except in the sense of their reviewing patches and accepting the contributions.”
Talking of Igalia, Wolvic is an open source browser “that opens a portal to the Web and all it has to offer, including immersive games, videos, and environments built for XR” from your chums at Mozilla and Igalia
The Costs of Exclusion: West Africa Regional Report (PDF) – The Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) has qualitative evidence of the economic impact that digital technology has on women’s lives — and the economy at-large — in Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and Nigeria.
There has been a lot of talk recently about Boris Johnson’s baseless assertion that the leader of the opposition, Keir Starmer, protected the notorious pedophile Jimmy Savile. Johnson’s top policy aide, Munira Mirza, resigned in protest:
I believe it was wrong for you to imply this week that Keir Starmer was personally responsible for allowing Jimmy Savile to escape justice. There was no fair or reasonable basis for that assertion. This was not the usual cut and thrust of politics; it was an inappropriate and partisan reference to a horrendous case of child sex abuse. You tried to clarify your position today but, despite my urging, you did not apologise for the misleading impression you gave.
The Far Right loves its pedophile conspiracies. But they have a very short memory when they choose to pin the blame purely on left-of-centre politicians.
The case of Jimmy Savile is difficult. Mr Savile is a strange and complex man. He deserves high praise for the lead he offers in giving quiet background help to the sick. But he has made no attempt to deny the accounts in the press about his private life.
As Prime Minister, Thatcher always invited him to her retreat at Chequers on Boxing Day. She finally got him knighted after her fifth attempt, in her final Honours List.
Of course, Savile was a friend of many high-profile people of all political stripes (although rumours were well-known; even as an aspiring teenage actor in Birmingham in the 80s, older friends in the business jokingly warned me about Savile.) She obviously wouldn’t have been so close to him if she knew the truth… would she?
Of course, that was before everyone knew what Savile had done. Much more recently, in 2019, Boris Johnson himself believed that historic pedophila is not worth investigating. He said police money is ‘spaffed up a wall’ when spent on historic child sex abuse investigations, so presumably pedophiles should be allowed to get away with it once they’ve stopped.
It seems that the further to the Right someone is, the more they are apologists for kiddy-fiddlers. For example, Poundshop Fuhrer “Tommy Robinson” loves to whip up hatred of muslims by campaigning against “grooming gangs”, yet had no qualms about supporting Richard Price, a leader of the English Defence League, even after he was convicted of making indecent images of children. The EDL has many pedophiles in its ranks.
I don’t think that accusing each other of excusing Savile or other pedophiles is part of the cut and thrust of politics, and it does a disservice to victims of sexual abuse. But if you’re going to engage in it, at least get your facts straight.
Update 14 April 2022: Also, let us not forget Tory MP Imran Ahmad Khan, found guilty of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old, and former Tory justice minister Crispin Blunt who called Khan’s conviction “a stain on our reputation for justice” and said “I hope for the return of Imran Ahmad Khan to the public service that has exemplified his life to date.”
Khan’s party leader Boris Johnson declined to apologise after it emerged that a Tory MP who molested a 15 year-old boy was advising the government on child sexual exploitation.
As you’re probably heartily sick of me telling you, the deadline to send comments to the UK monopoly regulator about its interim report on the mobile app ecosystem is 5pm on 7 February.
As the report is massive, many people will be put off reading it, although I’ve summarised it. But you can still let the regulator know what you think, with my handy persona-based email starter kit! Just choose one from the following, add any details from your personal experience you deem appropriate, paste into your email client and send it to mobileecosystems@cma.gov.uk
“As an iOS user, I am appalled that Safari was leaking my data for almost 2 months before it was fixed. On any other OS, I would use a different browser, but Apple’s App Store rule 2.5.6 requires all browsers to use its WebKit engine. If Apple can’t protect me, let me choose another browser”
“As a web developer, my job is made much harder because Safari lags behind other browser engines. I can’t usefully ask iOS users to choose another browser because Apple’s App Store rule 2.5.6 requires them to use Apple’s engine. This makes development more costly.”
“As a business owner, I would like to use mature, robust web technologies to deliver a Progressive Web App to Android and iOS. Apple’s App Store rule 2.5.6 cripples PWAs on iOS, so I must distribute and maintain 2 separate apps, greatly increasing costs and requiring payment to Apple.”
“As an Apple shareholder, I think it’s great that people can’t employ free technologies used on the web for 20 years to compete with native apps in Apple’s App Store. The revenue from developer licenses and the 30% fee we levy sure tastes good. Long live rule 2.5.6!”
It would be useful to tell them as many of these as is appropriate
If you are a UK resident, or your organisation does business in UK
A brief summary of the interests or organisations you represent
whether you are providing any material that you consider to be confidential, and explain why this is the case; and if the response contains confidential information, please also provide a non-confidential version of your response alongside it.
The specific ways in which unfair App Store or Browser choice policies have hurt your business (think lost revenue, increased costs, bugs, etc.)
Specific missing features and bugs that cause your ongoing business harm
What you would like CMA to do (e.g., alternative browser engines on iOS) and between the web and native (e.g., the inability to offer a lower-cost, higher service web experience vs being forced into app stores)
If you are an individual (ie you are not representing an organisation), please indicate whether you wish for your response to be attributed to you by name or published anonymously
Okay, okay, so perhaps the title is a little hyperbolic. But this is a very important week. The UK monopoly regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), is investigating Apple and Google’s mobile app stores. The opportunity for comments closes at 5pm UK time on 7 February. Here are some pre-written sample emails you can use. (If you’re in the USA, contact your elected senator; things are getting serious in Washington, too.)
if you are a UK developer, or non-UK but do business in the UK, you can let CMA know what you think about Apple’s refusal to allow other browser engines on iOS. iDevice owners can download something called Chrome or Firefox, but they are branded skins of WebKit, the same engine that Safari uses and Apple controls. This is because of Apple’s App Store rule 2.5.6:
Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript.
The leak was reported to the WebKit Bug Tracker on November 28, 2021 as bug 233548.
Update (Wednesday January 26th 2022): Apple has released Safari 15.3 on iOS and macOS where this vulnerability has been fixed.
For almost two months, iOS web users’ data was vulnerable–and downloading a differently-named browser would not have helped, because of Apple’s rule 2.5.6.
The lack of browser choice on iOS means that Progressive Web Apps can’t be distributed on iOS as they can on all other browsers. This means that developers either have to use a much less reliable technology like React Native (from Facebook) or make two apps, one for Android and one for iOS (and, potentially, a web app). This greatly increases development and testing costs for businesses. And, of course, developers must pay fees to Apple to be in their developer programme, plus a percentage to be listed in the App Store.
making it easier to switch browser, resulting in greater competition between browsers
requiring Apple’s operating system to allow third-party browser engines on iOS, or in the alternative to require Apple to allow web app developers greater interoperability with its mobile ecosystem
addressing the ability of Apple and Google to exercise market power by using browser settings to favour other parts of their mobile ecosystems, in particular digital advertising.
If you agree (or disagree) with any of these suggested requirements of Apple, please email CMAbefore 7 Feburary.
It would be useful to tell them as many of these as is appropriate
If you are a UK resident, or your organisation does business in UK
A brief summary of the interests or organisations you represent
whether you are providing any material that you consider to be confidential, and explain why this is the case; and if the response contains confidential information, please also provide a non-confidential version of your response alongside it.
The specific ways in which unfair App Store or Browser choice policies have hurt your business (think lost revenue, increased costs, bugs, etc.)
Specific missing features and bugs that cause your ongoing business harm
What you would like CMA to do (e.g., alternative browser engines on iOS) and between the web and native (e.g., the inability to offer a lower-cost, higher service web experience vs being forced into app stores)
If you are an individual (ie you are not representing an organisation), please indicate whether you wish for your response to be attributed to you by name or published anonymously
It doesn’t have to be long, but we need CMA to see how Safari (and lack of alternatives) hurts developers, and businesses, and ultimately consumers. Perhaps you could derive inspiration from this response by Jeremy Keith or Aaron T. Grogg. You *will* be listened to; they listened to me (twice!) and I’m no cleverer than you. The final report is due to be published in June 2022.
Defensive CSS – “a collection of snippets that can help you in writing CSS that is protected. In other words, you will have fewer issues in the future” by Ahmad Shadeed
Chromium has started experimental implementation of <selectmenu> – it’s like select but you can style all the constituent parts, instead of twatting about with billions of divs and wiring up keyboard and ARIA yourself (or hoping a framework will)
