An intense day for Apple, especially when it comes to its relationship with the European Unionsince it started with the announcement of the sanction in the case of Spotify and ends with “where I said, I say, Diego” regarding the support of WPA (Progressive Web Applications, an acronym in English), the decisions it has turned out to be arbitrary and have already given the European Commission work in in the event that we are faced with potentially illegal conduct.

Let’s recall, chronologically and quickly, the background that leads us to the current situation:

• September 6, 2023: The European Commission publishes a list of six companies considered gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act, and as a result it is said that Apple will have to make substantial changes to iOS, the App Store and in relation to Safari. .
• January 25, 2024: Apple confirms its adaptation to DMA and that related changes will reach users in the European Union in iOS 17.4.
• February 16, 2024: Apple surprisingly confirms that it is going to end support for Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) on iOS in the European Union, citing security and technical reasons and an expected low user adoption rate.
• February 22, 2024: Many tech companies affected by the way Apple is adapting to DMA are publicly denouncing what they see as a “malicious match”.
• February 27, 2024: The European Commission begins work ahead of an investigation into Apple to remove support for PWAs on community land.

With this chronology in mind, and the measures taken by Apple to limit the scope of the DMA application, we cannot rule out that the removal of PWA support, which we remember, was for years the main way for many companies to avoid the policies and commissions of the App Store, which happened precisely in response to the obligations imposed by the new legal framework. In short, this movement was a kind of revenge.

It seems, and again it’s speculative, that the shadow of another European Commission investigation may not have pleased Cupertino, hence the update to the tech support page Apple reports that support for PWAs on iOS will finally be preserved in the European Union and that it will be present in iOS 17.4, although it was removed in some beta versions of this OS update. You can read this update by expanding the “Why EU users can’t access web apps on the home screen” section, which also displays the original text of that section.

In this movement, therefore, Apple claims to have been able to resolve security issuesby making these web applications based exclusively on WebKit (and not on other engines that can get into the system using new web browsers with other technologies), something that will allow maintaining «a security and privacy model for native iOS apps«. Well, fortunately, we are facing a step in the right direction, although I wonder if it will solve the problem.

Because? Well, because of what Apple claims to maintain PWAs on iOS in the EU, ie. that only WebKit can be used to access progressive web applications, which is a state that persists to this day, but which may not please even the companies responsible for the rest of the browsers, and thus neither the regulators. Now at least Apple has bought time to check if the waters have calmed down, or if not, start working on multi-browser support for WPA in iOS with the security conditions it deems appropriate for the operating system. And my impression in this sense is that, at least in the short term, the European Commission will not enter such a particularly specific aspect, and that Apple has therefore earned a break. A rest that, yes, he wouldn’t have needed if he hadn’t acted like that to begin with.