> If PWAs win, it will just mean that the users got worse apps
If PWAs win, it will be because native apps failed. Android and MacOS both have an enormous community of open source native apps that are more private, functional and accountable than their commercial alternatives. So far, Apple hasn't opened the floodgate for that on iOS. As a result, the interest in sideloading things has been relegated to the most-open part of the OS; the browser. It's not surprising at all.
Apple could be enabling a Cambrian explosion of open iPhone apps and killing the case for dinky webapps overnight. Their motivation not to is rooted in a company-wide strategy to make more service revenue.
> If PWAs win, it will be because native apps failed.
Or because the vast majority of people who "write code that runs on mobile phones" know web technologies and not the mobile ones. Web programming is simply more accessible.
None of that really disagrees with what I said. Apple failed to lower the on-ramp for native development to the people that wanted it. Now we're seeing desperate porting attempts to the browser, and Apple's desperate attempt at plugging the gap.
> The thing is, "more" is not always "better".
In the free market, competition is king. "Better" is decided by pitting it against "more".
> Apple failed to lower the on-ramp for native development to the people that wanted it.
And they don't have to, IMHO. It's not that hard to learn how to do native iOS dev, and Apple is making a ton of money from those who do. Apple not wanting to go out of their way to lower the bar to a point that they don't find profitable is their choice.
> In the free market, competition is king.
I am not sure I am seeing "free market" and "competition" with PWAs, where people lobby to get laws to help them pass their ideas. The free market alternative would be for PWAs to get so good on Android that Apple decides to embrace them.
Well if you develop an Android PWA without having a single Android device to test it on, then maybe you should not develop an Android app at all. Same applies for iOS.
Can I run an Android emulator on my musl-based system? Can I even run Android-Studio on OpenBSD? What about Plan9? Should I complain to Google because they don't support all the platforms under the sun?
If I want to develop with Qualcomm boards, I need to sign all sorts of NDAs, and they don't even have emulators for development. Do you think that should be illegal?
I wish we tried to honestly make the difference between what is an inconvenience ("I don't want to need a macOS system to deploy on iOS") and what is abuse ("Apple removed my app from their Store because it was competing with theirs").
If PWAs win, it will be because native apps failed. Android and MacOS both have an enormous community of open source native apps that are more private, functional and accountable than their commercial alternatives. So far, Apple hasn't opened the floodgate for that on iOS. As a result, the interest in sideloading things has been relegated to the most-open part of the OS; the browser. It's not surprising at all.
Apple could be enabling a Cambrian explosion of open iPhone apps and killing the case for dinky webapps overnight. Their motivation not to is rooted in a company-wide strategy to make more service revenue.