The Register has learned from those involved in the browser trade that Apple has limited the development and testing of third-party browser engines to devices physically located in the EU. That requirement adds an additional barrier to anyone planning to develop and support a browser with an alternative engine in the EU.
It effectively geofences the development team. Browser-makers whose dev teams are located in the US will only be able to work on simulators. While some testing can be done in a simulator, there’s no substitute for testing on device – which means developers will have to work within Apple’s prescribed geographical boundary.
… as Mozilla put it – to make it “as painful as possible for others to provide competitive alternatives to Safari.”
I’ll de-apple when we get a viable alternative to Android. As is Google has far too much control over the entirety of that ecosystem to call it workably open, and if I’m going to choose between two proprietary vendors I’m going to choose the more reliable one with a business built around consumer interest instead of ad-company interests.
Try GrapheneOS. It has some quirks but it’s a good alternative. Been using it for two years on a phone and I’m considering getting it on a tablet.
Google still owns the ecosystem. They want to roll a new packaging system that depreciates apks and forces play store installs or Google based certificate pining? They’ll have 90% market capture in a year. It’s like using Opera/Edge/Etc and feeling safe from the decisions Google makes because of it, but they’re writing and designing Chromium upstream so they still own the agency and the choice (See Manifest v3). Given two companies both preventing me from owning agency of my own device, I’ll pick the lesser of the two evils and in my eyes that is currently Apple. I do hope to have a mobile operating system akin to Linux someday, but graphine os or any android dirivitive is not the solution, it just takes away my agency while they further the problem.