Apple is going to (mostly) obey the letter of the law but they will continue to resist strongly in every way they can. Onerous requirements, arbitrary restrictions, overzealous enforcement, and most of all bad APIs with limited capabilities and no workarounds for bugs.

Shipping a good and complete browser engine on iOS will require more than just developers. You'll also need a team of lawyers to threaten and sue Apple to get their policy restrictions relaxed and APIs fixed.

I doubt Mozilla or Google will be willing to spend the many developer-years and lawyer-years it will take to fully port every feature of a whole engine and properly maintain it in such a hostile environment, just for the Japan market. I expect to see some hobbyist-level ports but not something worth using for a long time. Unless other countries follow suit.

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arcanemachiner 7 hours ago | parent [-]

> just for the Japan market

Also the EU, no?

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modeless 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Does the EU also require third party engines to be able to replace the web view in apps systemwide? Or does it only require that single standalone browser apps can use alternative engines?

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concinds 7 hours ago | parent [-]

> Does the EU also require third party engines to be able to replace the system web view in apps systemwide?

Yes.

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modeless 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Hmm, actually now that I look closer at the Japan requirements, it doesn't seem to allow replacing the web view systemwide, as I thought, and as Android allows. And neither do the EU requirements. They only allow individual apps to embed an alternative engine on a per-app basis by including the whole engine within the app. And the Japan page includes the caveat "apps from browser engine stewards" which if interpreted zealously (and I expect Apple to) would forbid apps not from Google or Mozilla from embedding Chromium or Gecko.

This is a pretty big limitation considering how much iOS web browsing happens in web views. Having both the EU and Japan as markets may be enough for Google to port Chromium just for Chrome itself, but we will have to wait and see. Actually Chromium development is open so it should be pretty easy to see if Google has a serious porting effort or not.

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concinds 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> neither do the EU requirements

Wrong, they do specify "standalone web browsers as well as web browsers integrated or embedded in software or similar" are both covered, that's in the law.

What you're referring to is how Apple chose to implement it. The EU hasn't opened a compliance case on Safari yet but I expect they'll do so at some point.

	▲	modeless 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's not clear to me that the EU rules make Apple's implementation illegal. I hope they do.