After 27 months, it is only a few days before the official implementation of the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA). As an overseas manufacturer targeted by DMA, Apple has been brewing iOS 17 for a long timeThe 4 official version is also likely to be released on March 5th, so this makes iOS 174The official version may become a key node in the history of iOS because of DMA.
In addition to the much-anticipated third-party app stores and third-party browsers that can use web engines other than WebKit on the iPhone, there is actually another significant change, that is, Safari no longer supports the PWA that Apple originally promoted.
PWA (Progressive Web App) is also known as Progressive Web Application, which may be uncommon to the vast majority of domestic users. Because with the cooperation of domestic smartphones and a large number of developers with extremely fierce market competition, the domestic mobile Internet ecology has matured too quickly, and the APP ecology has been built in just a few years, so the intermediate product of Web APP, which is between the web and the APP, and has good cross-platform compatibility, has been directly skipped.
A concept proposed by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) in 2014, PWAs are cross-platform web applications created using service worker technology, modern web APIs, and traditional progressive enhancement strategies. It allows users to install web pages as applications on smartphones, and includes three major features: reliable, fast, and engaging (i.e., low threshold, fast speed, and high reliability). To put it simply, PWA can be regarded as the originator of mini programs, and the fast apps launched by mobile phone manufacturers today are its variants.
The biggest advantage of PWA is its cross-platform versatility and compatibility, which allows you to run as a native app and use it directly without going through an app store or installation package. Compared to the native app, it is obviously easier and faster to use PWA, and you can also share PWA apps through links.
In fact, PWA is cached through service workers and directly displays the locally cached content to users, which can optimize users' experience of weak and disconnected networks. When an update is available in the app, it is possible to update only the parts that have changed, rather than forcing the user to hot-update as the native app does.
Hiding the full-screen operation of the browser UI, OS-level notifications and alerts, device access even when offline, local data storage and retrieval, the ability to add icons on the desktop, and access to APIs such as LBS, camera, sensor, audio, Apple Pay, and more allow PWAs to deliver a high-performance experience in a web browser. Such a product that is similar to the native app, but more convenient than the latter, is the key to Google and Apple's push for PWA in the first place.
At that time, the mobile Internet was not as mature as it is today, and a large number of developers left over from the PC Internet era were not familiar with J**A, which used to write Android applications, and Objective-C and Swift, which used iOS applications. The advent of PWAs has allowed a large number of front-end developers to seamlessly package web pages into apps using j**ascript, which does not require compilation or submission to app stores for review. However, PWA not only represents Apple's vision of further prospering the iOS ecosystem, but also its cross-platform nature is also the guarantee of the pursuit of ecological unification at that time.
And the fact that an app can be used on Mac, iPad, iOS, and even the Apple Watch at the same time is something that even Apple's "Continuity" has been dreaming of. In this case, why did PWA not go all the way up in the subsequent development process, but became obscure? The most direct reason, of course, is that the gold mine of mobile Internet has attracted more and more people. In the past decade, learning Android iOS development has become a popular project, but the explosion of developers has caused the app to directly enter a state of oversupply.
Secondly, with the advancement of infrastructure construction in various countries around the world, as well as the successive expansion of domestic mobile phone manufacturers, high-quality and low-cost domestic smartphones have gradually entered the underdeveloped India, Southeast Asia, Africa, South America and other regions, which also makes PWA, a product that naturally adapts to weak and disconnected network environments, more and more useless.
Finally, and most crucially, the emergence of Mini Programs occupies the ecological niche that originally belonged to PWA. After all, for users, the biggest charm of PWA is convenience, that is, there is no need to open the app store, and there is no need to consume too much traffic.
The emergence of Mini Programs has caused the domestic PWA ecosystem to die directly before it has developed, but in overseas markets, especially in Europe and the United States, the situation is completely different. Thanks to the earlier development of the Internet industry, the local web ecology is more mature, and due to the lack of super apps like WeChat and Douyin, it is not surprising that PWA will become the European and American version of the mini program.
However, the emergence of DMA has directly changed the fate of PWA. Since Apple needs to allow third-party developers to use non-WebKit rendering engines to develop PWAs, this change directly prompted the decision to drop support for PWAs.
It is important to know that PWAs have a strong web color, which certainly makes them lighter than native apps, but it also brings inherent vulnerabilities on the web. In the network environment, PWA applications are more susceptible to various attacks and threats, such as QL injection, cross-site scripting, retargeting attacks, etc. Apple has revealed that it takes a lot of work to make PWAs compliant with DMA, and given the limited use of PWAs, it is obviously impractical to continue to invest resources.
As the company that attaches the most importance to user privacy and security in the consumer electronics industry, Apple cannot be more logical in order to comply with DMA requirements and ensure the security and privacy of users' data. It's a pity that with Apple's withdrawal, the web applications represented by PWA are destined to have no future.