They've done a great job organizing their protest campaign. I would be extremely surprised if it wasn't planned from the beginning. They are ultimately depending on Apple caving under pressure.
That said, they were clearly ready to loudly react to whatever trouble did emerge.
Who knows? All I know is if the end result is that Apple is held accountable by regulators and is forced to stop engaging in capricious anticompetitive behavior, then whether DHH is a master astroturfer or not doesn't matter much to me. The end result will have been good for us all.
If not, please refrain from disingenuously advancing obviously problematic ideas. It adds nothing to the conversation.
What's wrong with this being put forward? I would go so far to say that this is one of the four main things that happen when an app is rejected from an app store.
1. Change the app.
2. Don't support the platform.
3. Sideload.
4. Direct users from that platform to the web version.
The web browsers that meets the PWA requirements are Chrome, Edge, Firefox (to a large extent), Brave, Vivaldi, all available on Windows, Linux, Mac, Android.
Not Safari. And all browsers including Chrome and Firefox are just Safari under the hood (on iOS) so no completion for Apple. Apple does not even allow a competing browser engine.
I wouldn't call this "PWA support".
When I talk to friends at Google that work at Chrome, and tell them to convince Apple to support many of the features, they tell me that they have given up on them, and I can go talk to Apple if I want. They told me they're gonna keep progressing the web even if Apple wants to stay behind, they won't stop.
I've talked to people at Apple about this, they don't care. They always have a far fetched excuse. I know it's not the engineers fault, they are ordered by the upper management.
Instead of giving the money to Apple, we could easily reinvest it to grow.
It was a serious question. I'm sorry if it caught you in a situation that didn't allow you to perceive it in that way.