I have never seen or heard of anyone using a PWA outside our little tech bubble in real life. Nor have there been instructions in the news or many clickbait YouTube videos about how to use PWAs on your phone or PC.
The main problem is mobile safari. It is such a limited environment that basically apps are impossible to do for real world use cases in the browser. So, by necessity, even though I was hired to work on the web platform for my organization, I’m now working on a native app.
Apple has handicapped the mobile browser to the point where you have to go native. It is even worse than the IE days, because back then you could make a single web app that supported all browsers. You could have a web-only strategy. This is no longer possible for most organizations.
> The main problem is mobile safari.
Ah yes. "The problem". And not the fact that a lot of what you want is badly specified, poorly implemented and considered harmful by both Safari and Firefox: https://webapicontroversy.com/
That comes down to having more possibilities (even with every PWA feature implemented, there would still be so many missing), greater performance and battery efficiency.
As a developer I would love to see PWAs get more capabilities, but as a user I don't want my native apps to get replaced with PWAs to save on some money.
So the most likely outcome is that the average PWA would be less pleasant to use than the average app, which is a pretty clear cut loss for users.
From a user POV: Installing a native app is a decision. The native app capabilities let it do shady stuff with ads and exfiltrating your PII, might eat your battery, spam you with with notifications, and in case you forget to uninstall an annoying app it's a fail-open situation where it can keep on doing all this stuff in the background unless some day you remember to uninstall it. Browser ad blockers don't work on them. The app only works on your phone and with someprobability a web version doesn't exist, so it's a piece of tech that is inaccessible using a real computer, with a real screen and keyboard etc.
Unless you actually believe that Tim Cook committed perjury.
One. He knows there are no way to prove him wrong. Just like many other things he had said during Apple vs Qualcomm and Apple vs IMG. When there are ample of evidence his word are either lying by omission or a spin on a word's definition.
Two, AFAIK, he didn't said "they had been doing the change to 15% for under $1M before the actual Epic Games lawsuit was filed, and that it had been in the works for over a year."
He said and I quote "probably has its origins several years ago". They could trace that back as Phil Schiller's letter to Tim Cook on App Store if it needs to be.
99% of applications don't need to be an app, a Web page with some fancy data form and data presentation widgets is all that is needed.
Best of all, I don't need to deal with the mess that Android development has turned into.