Apple's Assault on Standards

> Market competition underlies the enterprise of standards. It creates the only functional test of designs and functions as a pressure release valve that enables standards-based ecosystems route around single-vendor damage. Without competition, standards bodies have no purpose, and neither they, nor the ecosystems they support, can retain relevance.

This is a strange rant about Apple specifically, because Apple, Google (the author's former employer), and Microsoft (the author's current employer) collectively monopolize both web browser market share and consumer OS market share on desktop and mobile. There is no competition, there are no web standards anymore except what the monopolistic browser vendors decide, and indeed the WHATWG successfully executed a coup d'état against the W3C standards body. Worldwide, Android has higher market share than iOS, Windows higher than macOS. I'm not trying to defend Apple, but I do think the author neglects to mention the essential role of his employers in this monopoly, destruction of competition, and assault on standards.

The author calls WebKit a "sham" of an open source project, not mentioning that Google used to participate in WebKit but then abandoned it, forking into a Google-controlled browser engine. Google's dominance of the web is so complete that even Microsoft was forced to abandon its own browser engine and adopt Google's. And we've seen the results of that: websites that only work in Chromium—thereby forcing browser vendors to adopt Chromium, furthering Google's monopolization—and worse, the debilitation of web browser extensions via the deprecation of Manifest V2. And if Apple doesn't happen to implement whatever Google decides, the author complains about it; why doesn't the author complain about how Google is driving all of the so-called "standards"? Why is the author not complaining about the lack of diversity in web browser engines? And even Firefox is ultimately beholden to Google, ironically arguing in court to preserve Google's monopoly so that Firefox can continue to receive Google money, Mozilla's main source of financing, even while Google continues to monopolize and force browser engines other than its own into obscurity. Firefox is a shell of its former self.

Again, this is not a defense of Apple. But Google and Microsoft are equally bad. Apple is at worst a duopolist, so how about talking about the other side of the duopoly?

The author seems to think that Apple is specifically targeting the web, trying to undermine it, but as a Mac user and developer for almost 2 decades, I don't think this is specific to the web or Safari. Whether it's malice or incompetence, Apple has been undermining the Mac too. Their software quality overall is now atrocious. And their UI is becoming atrocious too with "Liquid Glass", on all of Apple's platforms. If you focus only on Safari and WebKit, you're missing the forest for the trees.

This was a brutal read. It's as if someone wrote a simple thesis and ran it through an LLM to make it so pretentiously over the top it's unreadable. I suspect almost no one who actually upvoted this read the content, but instead just like the title and hit the arrow.

"Apple has poisoned the well through a monopoly on influence which it has parleyed into suppression of browser choice. This is an existential threat to the web, but also renders web and internet standards moot."

This is patently ridiculous, and sounds like the sort of tired nonsense that was the norm maybe a decade ago. Now, in 2025, to still be railing this off?

Apple's influence on the web hasn't been lower in two decades. This is ridiculous. It's one of those "no one likes my PWA, and somehow Apple is to blame" busted logic breaks we see on HN daily.

"Apple alone must be on the hook to implement any and every web platform feature shipped by any and every other engine."

I get that this is rhetorical bombast to try to make Apple eat crow for their Safari/webkit monopoly on iOS, but it falls apart given how laughably silly of an idea it is.

Apple absolutely should be forced to allow alternate browser engines, presuming those browser engines are not Chromium/Blink based. Firefox should have their engine. Anyone else who actually makes an engine should be able to deploy it to iOS.

Chromium/Blink? Absolutely no way. And anyone who doesn't understand why has absolutely no idea how Apple's malicious greed has paradoxically protected the web from a "Made For Chrome" world.

Worth pointing out that this was written by the "Microsoft Partner Product Architect on Edge", a product which Microsoft speed-ran its enshittification.

While the article seems to have a histrionic tone, it’s essentially correct that Apple have been unwilling to cooperate on standards (despite overtly signalling the opposite) and have had to be forced by regulation or market forces. There are plenty of examples of this, Safari/iMessage/lightning port etc.

- sent from my iPhone

The "Chrome Commit Tracker" linked is a pretty interesting set of visualizations that I hadn't come across before. Makes it a lot easier to get a feel for the sizes of the various teams, and how they change over time.

https://chrome-commit-tracker.arthursonzogni.com/organizatio...

> The result has been API enclosure; appropriation of commodity capabilities that themselves are standards-based — e.g., USB, Bluetooth, NFC, file storage, etc. — by a proprietary ecosystem and denial of even the safest and most privacy-preserving versions of those features by open, interoperable, and standards-based application platforms.

WebUSB, WebBluetooth, WebNFC are not standards. They are Blink-only non-standard APIs.

Google employees wrote these specifications and proposed that they become standards. In order to become standards, they need more than one independent implementation. So in practice, this means that they ask their counterparts at Mozilla and Apple for feedback and approval.

Both Mozilla and Apple rejected WebUSB, WebBluetooth, and WebNFC on privacy and security grounds.

This is what Mozilla has to say about WebUSB:

> we believe that the security risks of exposing USB devices to the Web are too broad to risk exposing users to them

This is what Mozilla has to say about WebBluetooth:

> This model is unsustainable and presents a significant risk to users and their devices.

This is what Mozilla has to say about WebNFC:

> We believe Web NFC poses risks to users security and privacy

— https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/

This is not Apple’s doing. The reason these things are not standards is because Google have been unable to convince anybody outside of Google to implement them, even when they pay Mozilla half a billion dollars a year.

Perhaps you think that Mozilla and Apple are too sensitive about potential privacy and security issues relating to new protocols proposed by the world’s biggest ad company. Did you know that after Google wrote a spec. for WebMIDI and shipped it in Chrome, porn companies started using it to fingerprint and track people?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23679063

> Apple alone must be on the hook to implement any and every web platform feature shipped by any and every other engine.

This is basically the author saying “Hey, you know those specifications we proposed that nobody wanted to implement but us? Let’s force Apple to implement them! Now we’ve got two independent implementations and they can be standards now!”

Why on earth would he do this?

> Hi, I'm Alex Russell, a Microsoft Partner Product Architect on the Edge team and Blink API OWNER. […] From 2008-2021, I was a software engineer at Google working on Chrome, Blink, and the web platform.

— https://infrequently.org/about-me/

> The sham of WebKit as an Open Source project

Chrome was created as a fork of that “sham” open-source project.

Chrome folks complaining about Apple not adopting "standards".

The author doesn’t attempt to address the issue that Apple and iOS are the only remaining effective bulwark against Google’s complete control of the web.

Think about what Google’s end game looks like if they are able to convince lawmakers and regulators around the world to force Apple to allow Chrome on iOS. Google will continue to spam standards proposals and implementations that Apple or Mozilla will be unwilling to adopt for various reasons. Google will continue to advertise Chrome heavily, and push users of its other services to install and use Chrome exclusively. Google search will prioritize sites that use Chrome specific technologies. Google Gemini will generate code that uses Chrome specific APIs.

When Chrome reaches sufficient market share, Google will start to use Chrome to disadvantage computing platforms that they do not control completely. New features will come to Android and ChromeOS first. Bugs may go unaddressed on other platforms.

I realize it’s frustrating as a web developer to have to deal with browser specific issues, or to be unable to take advantage of necessary APIs or platform features from your web app. It is also frustrating to be blocked from the App Store because Apple wants to avoid competition in some area. The current situation is unfair and far from ideal. Apple are not the good guys here.

But, framing the issues as being entirely about Apple and not addressing the situation with Google doesn’t work. And, unfortunately, many commentators (including the author of this article) as well as regulators (including the EU), don’t seem to get this. If these folks get what they are asking for, we aren’t going to enter a golden age with a single web platform that is feature rich and open to all equally, we are all just going to get crushed by Google.

While the article rightly critiques Apple's strategy of kneecapping the web to protect its App Store, it overlooks the user-centric view of these "crimes." Many users don't want websites having deep hardware access like Bluetooth; they see it as a necessary security boundary. The "Lightning frustration" was also largely a tech-media narrative, not a pain point for those invested in the ecosystem. We also can't ignore Apple's massive open-source contributions (LLVM, Swift, WebKit), and in many regards the most faithful adopter of the USB and Thunderbolt standards. Ultimately, it's a security trade-off. There's a reason iOS exploits command millions more than Android's. That best-in-class security is a direct product of the walled garden. For many, that's a more valuable feature than the total interoperability the author champions.

Lots of dismissive comments just because the author works in the industry, but who else will be able to shed the light on these things if not the people in the know?

BTW, consider this: on Android, you can install any browser with any rendering engine. The only reason you cannot install Safari, is because Apple won't make it for Android.

On iOS, the only rendering engine available is Safari's WebKit. Apple won't allow any alternatives. It wouldn't be a problem if Safari was perfect, but it's clearly not.

> Both fear and fervour about these proprties developed against a backdrop of libertarian1 attitudes toward regulation and competition.

> The internet's most consequential designs took competitive markets as granted.

In the old days, you'd stop reading the article if it had typos or obvious grammatical or other mistakes.

Today, we're more intrigued to read one, simply because it's an indication that it wasn't blindly written by AI?

I think a good argument can be made that the standards somewhat move a bit too slowly to add things? (Or, conversely, can be too eager to add some features.) Probably a bit of a struggle between de jure and de facto.

It can be frustrating, as many of the more important standards out there were de facto. We try and pass them off as otherwise, but "div/span/XmlHttpRequest" and plenty of others were in practice before they were part of the standard.

None of which is to excuse players from not at least accurately advertising what standard they support. There should be consumer protections involved on that. And I think a decent argument can be made that stricter compliance can be expected from the big players.

I dislike Apple's behavior as much as the next guy, but my goodness what a difficult, unfocused piece of reading.

I kind of agree with the author, I just wished his writing were more to the point, and less sprinkled with pseudo-sophistication.