Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong revealed that the company could remove the dApp browser from its iOS wallet app.
It seems that Apple has decided to completely remove the use of dApps from the App Store, which would also mean removing the dApp browser from the Coinbase app.
Nothing is official yet, although an explicit message has appeared within the app itself suggesting the removal of this feature,
“in order to comply with App Store policy“.
The change, if applied, will apparently only affect the iOS version of the Coinbase app, and not the Android version or the desktop wallet, since with its WalletLink feature it will still be possible to access dApps via Coinbase Wallet.
However, considering that there have been similar cases on Android lately, like the removal of the MetaMask app, it is not possible to exclude that the Android version of the Coinbase app will also remove the dApp browser in the future.
The real reasons behind this hostile attitude towards dApps are not known, but they could relate to the fact that, since they are decentralised, it would be very difficult to identify those responsible in case of problems.
In other words, people responsible for the Apple App and Google Play stores in case of problems with dApps or similar could only do one thing, which is to remove them, so it’s possible that they decided to do it beforehand in order to solve the root of the problem.
As a matter of fact, Armstrong reveals that:
“If Apple customers want to be able to use Dapps, we may need to make this request know to Apple in some way”.
This suggests that in order to use dApps on Apple devices in the future, it may be necessary to request permission or send an explicit request.
Furthermore, in response to what Coinbase’s CEO said, someone suggested that it might be just the beginning of the ban by the Apple store, since the same reasoning could be applied to most other wallets, such as TrustWallet and MetaMask itself.
