As noted elsewhere, a developer-lamented but regulator-overlooked aspect of Apple's monopoly on iOS browser engines has been the prevalence of show-stopping bugs.
We define "showstoppers" here as bugs that cause working apps to become entirely broken or inadvisable to use on the web.
All browsers have issues, but iOS is unique in depriving users of choices that developers can recommend when the system-provided engine breaks. Users and developers have literally no choice; they can't choose a different browser to work around Apple's frequent bouts of platform breakage. How bad is it? To get a sense for the impact, we've laid out the worst issues of the past decade. We've also included a rough estimate of the fraction of time when web apps would have worked as advertised on iOS but for Apple's implementation... hiccups.
Via Alex Guyot:
These bugs heavily impact websites and web apps that are trying to build more sophisticated experiences on the web. They affect a wide variety of platform features which Apple itself claims to be stable and fully-supported. Safari is the only major browser that consistently ships bugs this nasty, and especially the only one that leaves them there for years.
[...]
The web isn't an app store where you can list your site for only certain operating systems. People aren't going to build ambitious PWAs when anyone who actually manages to install them on iOS is met with a broken experience.
I agree (and love it!) that Safari's been improving on web standards recently, but this is also the year in which Apple almost killed PWAs with no notice, and has a bug in iOS 18 where keyboards don't show up in PWAs in the EU.
Guillermo Rauch:
People often think native apps are better due to "performance of compiled code" but it's actually due to "not a hostile, buggy, artificially API-poor environment".
In the fullness of time, the web will win due to its superior deployment model and developer freedom. The days are long but the decades are short.
Joeri:
I was all-in on mobile web apps, but apple's policy around iOS and browsers pretty much forced my hand. I had to watch how a native app team rewrote the web app I had already built, with the same feature set, except with notifications and more offline storage, crucial requirements at the time. This was over a decade ago, and while things have gotten a little better, the gap between what a web developer can do on iOS and what a native developer can do has never been wider.
scottjenson:
Too many don't understand Apple's privacy stance, which has some reasonable elements, is being used to massively foot drag on everyone else trying to build an open web ecosystem.