The reality is that Apple has significant market share, and Apple doesn't really follow very often. Ever heard if NIH and the reality distortion field?
Apple has ~15% of the market share as of 2014. Android is at ~82%. Heck, your venturebeat.com link mentioned it as well.
The second link doesn't explain at all why Apple should decide how a standard should work. Are you telling me that a single company that has the most people with money should be the one that determines how the standard works? That's like saying the richest candidate should win the presidency because he has the most voters that has money (actually, that actually feels like it most of the time in US).
> Ever heard if NIH and the reality distortion field?
What's NIH? I know National Institute of Health but I don't understand how they're related here.
Yes, I've heard of RDF. These W3 folks should not even care about it and is smarter than most people, they shouldn't be falling for it and focus on getting standards out based on technical merits, not marketing.
The entire argument of the article is that because of Apple's mobile presence, they can effectively veto the standards process by doing nothing. They can act as an anchor. They don't even have to actively torpedo standards.
Device share is irrelevant considering the context is w3c/browswer standards. The relevance of money is to explain Apple's behavior, not condone it. The richest candidate does rather overwhelmingly tend to win, I'm not saying it's right, I'm saying I understand it. If you want to change such outcomes it takes a lot of work.
The relevance of NIH/RDF is they're fighting a culture that probably can't be fought. It'd be better to work on Google and possibly even Microsoft of all companies to get the momentum they need for this standard. All of the same arguments lobbed against Microsoft before and during the significant work of the w3c for either being an anchor or torpedo are the same here. It's simply how big companies behave, and I know a bunch of Apple fans who suggested Apple would never do this if they ever "won" and ended up on top, because they're somehow good/ethical and Microsoft was malicious. And now we see just how neutral the morality of big companies really is because Apple doesn't have to act maliciously to stop progress.
All Apple has to do is have a walled garden with the best API's only available to native apps, and then sit on their laurels with the web browser. It's different only in the details of what Microsoft did. I personally don't like this, but history repeating itself is hardly surprising.
Device sales and operating systems are irrelevant to web standards: what matters is what browser visitors use.
Google has a problem here - where Android is growing fastest (China, India, etc) people don't use mobile Chrome. China has the most Android users, and UC Browser, QQ Browser, and the old no-longer-supported Android browser are all far more popular than Chrome on mobile devices.
https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr...
And then there's this.
http://venturebeat.com/2014/12/03/why-do-ios-users-buy-more-...
The reality is that Apple has significant market share, and Apple doesn't really follow very often. Ever heard if NIH and the reality distortion field?