I keep seeing this conspiracy. It came out during the epic trial that the vast majority of revenue from the App Store comes from pay to win games. Apple isn’t making money off of apps that could be a web apps.
Apple has deliberately under-invested in implementing web platform features on Safari. If you've tried to build a web app on Safari vs Android Chrome, you'll know what I mean. It's not a conspiracy - it's a clear as day policy to keep consumers and developers locked into their platform.
Why didn’t Epic just make all of their game web apps on Android and PC.
The only thing it adds to the picture is that the majority of their revenue is also extremely predatory and the underlying model essentially works the same way as slot machines.
Once the core gaming APIs are supported across both iOS and Android (WebGPU, SIMD, WASM threads, fast storage, install prompts, notifications), I think you will see the main gaming engines implemented and then you’ll see the games move.
We have a control in the experiment - we have an “open ecosystem” in Android and supposedly a much better browser - yet and still, game developers still choose to give Google the same 30% cut as Apple. Maybe it’s not because Apple is holding the web back?
If you get some time we've written a lot of detail about it here: https://open-web-advocacy.org/walled-gardens-report/
Personally I hate loot boxes etc, It's an awful business model.