> oing a region-locked "you can release alternate browser engines but only regionlocked to japanese apple accounts" could be seen as intentionally preventing alternative browsers from existing.

That's one of the things Apple has been doing with EU

Partly because the EU law's phrasing wasn't as "I'll know it when I see it", and partly because apple seems to not care about the spirit of the law and just want to exploit its users.

The japanese law's phrasing is apparently better, but I kinda expect apple to still ignore it and then drag whatever comes through court as long as possible

My understanding is that Gecko has already been ported to iOS.

It's still a huge amount of work to support two ios builds for such a small audience. Also, the prototype they had no has jit because apple makes targeting ios a moving target (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1904546), and it has never been polished enough for end users.

Not having JIT is a showstopper on the modern web where most sites take more javascript than all of windows 3.1 and word perfect combined.

To increase their already tiny fraction of marketshare by another tiny fraction?

To be fair a tiny fraction of marketshare can represent a very attractive level of revenue depending on the market

We thought the same when the Slovenian government passed a law requiring Apple (among others) to translate their operating systems to Slovene. Apple was the outlier here, as Android, Windows, even various Linux distros had all been translated years ago. To the surprise of many, they complied, releasing a full translation of decent quality in a stunningly short time.

The market they'd otherwise lose access to would be roughly 2 million people. The Japanese population is over 60 times that. I don't think they want to risk losing that.

> I don't think they want to risk losing that.

It depends on the cost.

Translating the OS to Slovene really just costs whatever a translation service costs, plus review & a bit of ongoing maintenance. Even on the high end, I doubt it would push 8 figures up front, and probably 6 in yearly maintenance.

If compliance with the Japanese law means every iOS build in every region must support alternate browser engines, what's the cost to Apple? They clearly must believe it's high (otherwise they would have done so already). Brand risk? Maybe, and hard to price that, but at Apple's valuations and revenues that could be 9+ figures depending on severity. Loss of revenue from Google (if they still pay to be the default search engine in Safari)? That could be a large number too.

It all comes down to the numbers. How much will Apple lose by pulling out of Japan (possibly betting on such a move being temporary, hoping Japan changes their mind, and also hoping that their reputation worldwide doesn't suffer) vs allowing alternate browser engines worldwide?

> Why would mozilla port firefox when it can only target a tiny fraction of its users?

Mozilla is used to only a tiny fraction of users anyway. Why would this be any different? It could also be a chance to release a version for QA by the users before the rest of the market opens up.

Comparing all "tiny fractions" as if they're identical is nonsense.

"Why wouldn't apple make an iphone mini even though it only targets a tiny fraction of people? They already only target a tiny fraction of the living animals on earth because they don't make iphones for fish"

The reality is that japan is less than 5% of iphones, and mozilla has to focus it's limited resources.

Also, if mozilla's, mostly US based, developers can't run firefox on ios, they can't even build it in the first place

But this would be a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction.