That iOS It is the most closed operating system of all the popular ones on the market, a fact that even Apple publicly boasts about. This walled garden not only prevents or at least makes it difficult for third-party shops, but is also a complete dictatorship for third-party web browsers, which are forced to use the WebKit rendering engine used by Safari.

Although it is possible to download third-party web browsers for iOS through the App Store, they all have to rely on the WebKit engine that comes pre-installed with Safari.. The most extreme case is that of Firefox, whose rendering engine, which has no relation to WebKit, cannot be used in Apple’s mobile operating system due to the above obligations.

The situation of Safari and WebKit within iOS is quite controversial, as Pavel Durov, the founder of the messaging service Telegram, accused Apple of boycotting web applications on its mobile system by not including certain functions and technologies that have long been consolidated. such as notifications, WebM video stickers, and Opus audio playback. In other words, the development of WebKit for iOS is allegedly being partially abandoned by Apple, which means another roadblock for third-party web browsers and web applications.

Is there a way around forcing the use of WebKit on iOS? It seems Google has started working on being able to use the Chromium/Chrome rendering engine, Blink, on Apple’s mobile operating system.. While it is true that Blink was born as a fork of WebKit, the situation of the mentioned rendering engine in iOS may be the impetus to try to develop a port of Blink. Google is talking about a prototype that is part of a wider open source initiative, and so far it does not seem that results will appear in the short term.

Google’s attempt to bring Blink to iOS may be a move in relation to the situation that Apple’s walled garden has experienced in recent years and has been challenged by rivals such as Epic Games. The US government wants Google and Apple to open up their ecosystems more, pointing to regulatory changes in the European Union that would force the apple giant to allow third-party stores.

It remains to be seen how the story of Blink porting to iOS ends, but it can be justified it would be ugly to force Apple to accept third-party stores while allowing it to force WebKit to all web browsers. If alternative renderers are enabled, we should be able to see both Chromium’s Blink and Firefox’s Quantum/Gecko on iOS.