Apple is withdrawing part of its restrictive response to EU regulations that forced it to make changes to the iPhone and iOS. When the EU said Apple had to allow third-party web browsers on the iPhone, the company responded by killing EU web apps. After developers and some users complained, the company changed its policy and will once again allow EU users to store a website as an app on their home screen.
Web apps harken 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 as an app. The feature was developed to allow web applications to save data and send push notifications to the user. Macrumors has a good guide on how web apps work and why they are useful. A web app is much smaller than an app you download from the App Store, for example.
Especially, Xbox cloud gaming it relies on a web app to function on the iPhone. You can play all your Xbox games on your phone, using an Xbox controller, thanks to the Xbox website acting as a web app. By adding this feature back in iOS 17.4, Apple saved Xbox gamers who stream their game library through 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 problem with web applications, described by Apple, is that iOS is designed to be secure only when a Webkit browser creates a web application. Webkit is Apple’s own browser, which is different from Chromium browsers such as Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge and other browsing engines. If a third-party Chromium browser creates a web app on iOS, it could gain access to the camera or install additional software without the user’s knowledge. In order to solve this problem, Apple has announced that it is ending the ability to use web applications for users from the EU.
Fortunately, Apple says in a recent update that it has reversed course and will allow third-party browsers to build web apps. When these apps are created and saved to the Start screen, they appear to launch in Apple’s Webkit browser instead of a third-party browser. It’s not clear how this might affect performance, but for now it seems like a reasonable trade-off.
“We have received requests to continue offering support for Home Screen web apps on iOS, so we will continue to offer existing Home Screen web app capabilities in the EU. This support means that home screen web apps continue to be built directly on WebKit and its security architecture, and are compliant with the security and privacy model for native iOS apps,” says Apple on its developer page.
Apple has said in the past that web apps aren’t very popular, citing “very low user acceptance of web apps on the home screen” as the reason the feature wasn’t worth the extra effort to develop a proper, secure solution to the problem.