Slashdot Mirror
Apple Handcuffs Web Apps On iPhone Home Screen
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."
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.
The cause of this has been discovered already; it's a software bug. iOS 4.3 has a new JavaScript engine. Websites launched from the home screen seem to be reverting to and using the old JavaScript engine from iOS 4.2. The article makes it sound like a conspiracy. I'm sure it'll be patched soon; I can think of no obvious reason to do this but give the same apps full speed if bookmarked within the web browser.
It's unclear whether these are accidental bugs or issues consciously introduced by Apple.
So, they have no idea whether or not it's actually malicious, but they've decided to run with the story using an inflammatory headline anyway.
According to Apple developers posting to the web, the speed issue has been discussed in the company's developer support forums, and one developer – the same unnamed developer quoted above – confirms with The Reg that multiple bugs have been filed on the issue.
Developers are using proper channels to report what's most likely a bug and this is most likely a non-story as of the next minor update, but they've still decided to run with it anyway.
Apple isn't degrading the speed of home screen web apps. It's boosting the speed of web apps in the browser. But in the long run, the effect is the same. And if this is a bug, Apple has yet to fix it.
So, in fact, Apple hasn't intentionally hobbled anything, it's just that they haven't sped them up, possibly due to a bug, yet they're still going to run this story.
This developer reiterates that if Apple didn't specifically introduce these problems in iOS, it's aware of them now. And he says that the Mobile Safari team has indicated the issues will not be fixed.
You'd think that such damning evidence would be posted, but it isn't. Complete hearsay, but they've decided to run the story, inflammatory headline and all, regardless.
There is an app for that.