Quoting a recent article by Owen Williams: “Apple’s control over its app ecosystem is a new type of monopoly that’s hard to understand for lawmakers, and difficult‧‧‧
Quoting a recent article by Owen Williams: “Apple’s control over its app ecosystem is a new type of monopoly that’s hard to understand for lawmakers, and difficult for us to fight back against — because there simply isn’t a way out of these restrictions when the company controls both the distribution method and the platform itself“.
According to the author, the company (Apple) has made it extremely difficult to use web-based technology on its platforms. For the less technical readers, Web information system, or web–based information system, is an information system that uses Internet web technologies to deliver information and services, to users or other information systems/applications. It is a software system whose main purpose is to publish and maintain data by using hypertext-based principles. A web application (or web app) is an application software that runs on a web server, unlike computer-based software programs that are stored locally on the Operating System of the device. Web applications are accessed by the user through a web browser with an active internet connection. These applications are programmed using a client server modeled structure—the user (“client“) is provided services through an off-site server that is hosted by a third-party. According to Microsoft, web technologies include the following: Mark-up languages, such as HTML, CSS, XML, CGI, and HTTP (Front-end or Client-side technologies) Programming languages and technologies that help create applications for the web. The programming languages used to build the web often find their way into apps, too. Apple has a history of stunting the web’s progress on its platforms. On iOS, Apple doesn’t allow fully independent third-party browsers, requiring all apps to leverage its Safari browser when rendering web-based content. “While browsers like Chrome and Opera are available in the App Store, they must use Apple’s Safari browser behind the scenes to render web pages, rather than their own. That means Apple has a monopoly on how iPhone and iPad users access the web“.