Apple is walking back some of its restrictive response to EU regulations that have forced the company to make changes to the iPhone and iOS. When the EU said Apple should allow third-party web browsers on the iPhone, the company responded by shutting down web apps for the EU. After developers and some users complained, the company changed its policy and will once again allow EU users to save a website as an app to their home screen.
Web apps hark back to the original days of the iPhone, when there was no App Store. Instead, you could pin a web page to your home screen and it worked just like an app. The feature is designed to allow web apps to store data and send push notifications to the user. Macrumoren has a good explanation of how web apps work and why they are an advantage. A web app is much smaller than an app that you download from the App Store, for example.
Remarkable, Xbox cloud gaming relies on a web app to function on the iPhone. You can play all your Xbox games on your phone with an Xbox controller, thanks to the Xbox website acting as a web app. By adding this feature back in iOS 17.4, Apple has saved Xbox gamers who stream their game library via their iPhone. The software update will be available in early March, so we expect it any day now.
Web apps are a security problem according to Apple
The issue with web apps, described by Apple, is that iOS is only designed to be secure when a Webkit browser creates the web app. Webkit is Apple’s proprietary browser engine, different from Chromium browsers such as Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, and other browser engines. If a third-party Chromium browser creates a web app on iOS, it can access the camera or install additional software without the user’s knowledge. To address that issue, Apple announced it would eliminate the ability to use web apps for EU users.
Fortunately, Apple says in a recent update that it has changed course and is allowing third-party browsers to create web apps. When these apps are created and saved to the home screen, it appears they will run in Apple’s own Webkit browser engine rather than the third-party browser. It’s unclear how this might affect performance, but for now it seems like a reasonable compromise.
“We have received requests to continue supporting Home Screen Web Apps in iOS, so we will continue to offer existing Home Screen Web Apps capabilities in the EU. This support means Home Screen web apps are built directly on WebKit and its security architecture, aligning with the security and privacy model for native apps on iOS,” says Apple on its developer page.
Apple has said in the past that web apps aren’t very popular, citing “very low user adoption of Home Screen web apps” as a reason why the feature wasn’t worth the extra effort to provide a good, secure solution for develop this problem.