Apple TV: A World Without Webviews

Daniel Pasco:

Webkit is the framework that Apple uses to allow developers to include webviews in their apps. UIWebview, a UIKit class, provides a simple way to do so. Both of these are missing from tvOS.

Even though the classes exist to fetch a page from a remote site, nothing else is really there — the content has to be parsed, the DOM has to be built, the actual HTML has to be rendered and styled, and any embedded Javascript has to be run. There’s no mechanism for doing any of these things or presenting the Web page to the users. […]

No matter what the motivation, there’s going to be a lot of work for people to do, particularly for companies that lean heavily on embedded Web content for their apps. Obviously this is going to be great for users, in terms of a consistent experience.

But the industry is going to be very, very busy for a while making the changes needed to support this new platform.

★ Tuesday, 15 September 2015