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Comment by alin23 | Hacker News Reader

As a macOS app developer with 5 years of experience, I agree with the "compatibility" and "absurd App Store requirements" arguments.

But I still build apps instead of websites, because:

    1. I can create experiences which are not possible on the web

(e.g. controlling monitor brightness with https://lunar.fyi/)

    2. I can more easily make money from it

(e.g. selling https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd on the App Store was so much easier than integrating a payment/licensing SDK myself)

In my view, the web is mostly used for information while apps are mostly created to provide an experience.

With PWAs and their new native like features, we might be moving towards closing that gap on mobile in terms of experience.

But the "making money" part still remains partly unsolved. It's much harder to sell a PWA than an app on the App Store, and this deters developers from pursuing that approach.

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In my experience, the web is perfect when it comes to presenting an interface to a service.

If the service or experience exists entirely within your application, a mobile or native app seems to be the only option.

I didn’t know your app was a thing. I’m on my iPhone now but I will purchase it as soon as I go back upstairs to a Mac. Thanks!

> But the "making money" part still remains partly unsolved.

This is the only thing that concerns me about my current app plans. But here's my current thought process. A PWA would be much easier to use to test the market. Because it's faster to iterate and to deliver on both mobile OSs. Monetization of a social media app comes after you've attracted tens of thousands of users. So two years out if you still have a business, you can invest in native implementations.

Money comes either from users or from advertisers or both.

I think Apple will direct more developers towards building PWAs because it will reduce their review burden. Why else would they be adding features (notifications, installation) that make PWAs better? Doesn't it make sense therefore that Apple will also add support for monitization?

Native support for buying PWAs (or at least in-app purchases) would probably be a game changer yes.

It sounds possible in theory: Apple gets to keep their 30% cut while allowing devs to sell even more apps.

But they would have no way of screening the PWAs, and if a PWA reaches enough feature parity to be usable by big sellers of subscriptions like Netflix, those sellers will surely invest effort in creating a PWA with their own payment SDK that bypasses Apple’s cut.

This is where I think the incentives are not aligned. Small devs want an easy to use monetization framework and are happy to give a percentage of their income for that, but Apple might want more large sellers which bring far more money for less managing effort.

> Small devs want an easy to use monetization framework and are happy to give a percentage of their income for that

Small devs want competition. Apple goes out of their way to prevent that, you can't sing it's praises when it's literally the only option.

I don't see any intersection of Apple and Netflix. Big media services like Netflix have their own subscription services.

>This is where I think the incentives are not aligned

But could be aligned to everyone's benefit.

You might not be familiar with the App Store restriction on in-app links/buttons to external payment methods. An app on the App Store must only provide subscriptions through Apple's own means which gives them a 30% cut of every subscription payment.

It took a long legal battle to allow Netflix to show a button to their own external subscription website: https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-says-japan-fair-tra...

But even so, there are a lot of other big sellers which haven't yet got their external button approved.

> Why else would they be adding features (notifications, installation) that make PWAs better?

There's a team at Apple that owns PWA's and is iterating on them. Large organizations like Apple usually don't follow some grand strategy.

completely unrelated but I love rcmd - it is 100% ingrained into my muscle memory at this point. Great work!

Thanks for the love! Always happy to see when my work helps others as well

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