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Apple Handcuffs Web Apps On iPhone Home Screen

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the evil-or-oops dept.

SF Polack writes "On Apple's iOS 4.3, HTML5 and JavaScript apps are running significantly slower when they're run from the iPhone or iPad home screen rather than Safari, and the OS is hindering the performance of these apps in other ways. The end result is that it's harder for web apps to compete with native iOS app sold through the App Store, where Apple takes a 30 per cent of sales."

1 of 298 comments (clear)

  1. It's a bit to soon to say for sure by linuxci · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why would it be about 30%, most web apps are free and 30% of zero is zero. Apple allow free apps in their store.

    This bug only occurs when you launch a web app that contains a meta tag of name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes"

    If your 'web app' is just a shortcut to Safari on your homescreen then you won't see this bug.

    Basically this web app meta tag launches the app fullscreen without any Safari chrome. To the user it looks like a separate app rather than it's running in the browser.

    The slow behaviour is just using the iOS 4.2 JavaScript engine. It's possible that this is either an oversight or that Apple deliberately kept the old JavaScript engine for web apps in case it broke functionality that the app was depending on.

    We'll see in the coming weeks I'm sure.