Re: I
I believe you are confusing two separate things here: Apple’s relationship with developers who release stuff for its platform, and Apple’s relationship with consumers who bought its devices.
“App developers cannot release a new version of their PWA which works because Apple has blocked all of them.” Sucks to be an EU-based developer then. But Apple have no contract with them. IPad purchasers, the people who do have a contract, are not affected by that aspect. Sorry, you just have to put that argument aside, it doesn’t affect anything.
“It is not simply that the sausage maker chose to go vegan only. It is that they have also entered the houses of everyone who bought their sausages and removed them, even though they had no need to do so.” Maybe….let’s deconstruct that: does Apple have the right to force-deprecate Apps? Well, they can’t (and don’t) force upgrade people’s IOS version. They can (and do) routinely upgrade IOS version at the users request, which has the effect of deprecating some of the Apps on their devices, those ones that don’t support the newer version. As long as Apple have informed you that upgrading the IOS will break a particular functionality, and you do it anyway, that’s your choice. So no, that argument doesn’t fly.
“They are doing that to try to punish the regulators for having made the change that they don't like. This is not supposition no matter how you intend to characterize it.” Yes it is supposition, and I don’t particularly believe it. And even if true, it doesn’t matter, because as long as the act is lawful, intent doesn’t matter.
“They could have allowed other browser engines, and those engines are capable of running PWAs inside themselves. Those engines probably would need to have code added to interact with some of the hardware, but that's the job of the people writing those engines, not Apple.” I 100% agree. 3rd party browser authors have spent years arguing that they shouldn’t be forced to use WebKit…and now they’ve been handed the keys to the kingdom we discover that they haven’t bothered to code any of the hard edge-cases, which they expected just to use WebKit anyway. Now that Apple is saying “well you’ve opted out of WebKit, so you can’t use it” they’ve been found out. Do we know that if/when any of the other browser manufacturers implement WebKit-like functionality, PWAs won’t work? I don’t know that at all. PWA’s now open in-browser. If Firefox make push notifications work in their browser, then….push notifications will work in their browser. Is that technically possible? I have no idea, and there’s no reason Apple should care, that’s Firefox responsibility.
“Existing PWAs could run in WebKit because that is what they're already set to run in” No they shouldn’t, Apple does *not* have that legal freedom. The EU made it a legal requirement that the user be allowed to opt out of using WebKit. This is what that looks like in practice. You absolutely cannot require a company to manage the situation where people “sign a legally binding opt out from WebKit”, the users selection doesn’t work, and Apple have to fall back to the working solution, with the risk of getting sued because they did something that the user has opted out of. This is the carbon copy of the GDPR problem. “Do you accept cookies that this website needs to do its job”….user clicks “no I don’t accept”….website says “well, I need them to do my job, so I’m going to ignore your non-acceptance and set them anyway”? Results in getting sued. Sorry, no. If you don’t accept cookies, the website may not have its full functionality, or indeed any functionality.