We haven't been able to convince the consumer that a website and app are not so different.
I've been setting up Saas tool for fitness apps and its such a pain to deal with the app stores, the reviews, updates, commissions and lack of control.
It would be great if Google could direct their marketing budget to the consumers, not the devs :)
So don't! just build a PWA as your web front-end and package it as an app for the stores to distribute it (see PWABuilder - https://www.pwabuilder.com or Capacitor - https://capacitorjs.com). You get the best of both worlds, unified simple development and the App Store distribution model.
"Cross-platform apps have never been easier. All the features customers love from native now on the web... We call it iApps."
They tried. They dumbed down native programs to look more and more like web apps. The only success was Teams. /s
Then they allowed third party apps on their app store and realized how easily they could be monitized... Just watch the original announcements for the iphone and the jobs interviews from that time period.
Just deliver mobile Web sites, the PWA part is an optimization.
[0] I founded https://webtoapp.design
For me the change was beneficial and customers happy because it removed the feature delay between web and apps.
So yes, there's a long way to go, but it still feels like a right direction.