Anti-Competitive
Safari moves to kill PWAs
Apple released Safari 13.1 yesterday and introduced stricter 3rd party cookie blocking features that aims to prevent websites from fingerprinting Safari users and tracking them across the web. Okay, that sounds great right? Um maybe not so much, lets examine the consequences of that move.
This feature comes as part of a major update to Safari Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP). According to John Wilander, the WebKit engineer behind the feature, “Safari now blocks all third party cookies.”
“Safari now blocks all third party cookies.”
Self preservation
The web is celebrating this as a huge milestone for privacy, and it is, but only for Apple devices and that isn’t the only thing we take issue with either. We are not saying that the Safari team is up to anything nefarious mind you, we just believe Apple is motivated by self preservation more than anything else. If any of them ever brought up the idea of Safari supporting PWA’s to Apple’s leadership team, the room would get real quiet real fast.
PWA’s are the key and App Stores are the lock
As a part of our three part series starting with The Illusion of platform choice. Part 1 we touched on Apple’s behavior as it tries to protect its App Store and that the App Store is the key to its platform power.
PWA’s are the key seeing more diversity in operating systems and reducing reliance on the App Store model. Who do you think stands to lose the most if PWA’s becomes a success. Yes that’s right the company that created the App Store Warehouse model in the first place, Apple.
What if we still had WebOS, FireFoxOS, Symbian, Blackberry OS, Windows Mobile, MeeGo and others. PWA’s are the key to more platform choice and App Stores are the lock.
We are hopeful that PWA’s that a user pin’s to their home screen will work reliably and as expected when PWA’s are evenutally supported but we are not holding our breath.
For more on this ongoing discussion visit here.
By Platform De.Central
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