Home Screen Advantage
infrequently.org
infrequently.org
As for the topic being discussed - Apple have gone out of their way for the last _decade_ to avoid implementing things like ServiceWorkers properly. I remember having this same conversation back in 2015. It is a real shame, as things like the proposed w3c sensors api would totally eliminate the pain of deploying private/internal/enterprise apps to a fleet of employees, for example. There is so much that this enables for private apps. I won't be surprised if their decade+ old viewport meta tag reference documentation for home screen icons and status bar styling in full screen mode stops working at some point too - it's been neglected for years. It'll be a weird, heartbreaking example of corporate revisionism, especially considering Steve Jobs' original vision for apps on the iphone.
I'm not a huge fan of the big G either, but I honestly hope they take advantage of this with some clever (non-developer) product-centric marketing. PWAs are a very well thought out approach to 90% of what modern apps are. We absolutely should be sandboxing private browser instances per PWA, not shipping entire separate webkit wrappers for every app every time an app is updated. It's almost literally the same difference as shipping layered container images as updates instead of giant VM blobs. Such a huge loss.
Also obvious by how this post is already on 14th place after 2 hours, with more than 200 votes. (Edit: now 31, 3 hours in)
Most of them unironically call themselves "apple users".
They don't use a device, they've made the device part of their identity, and even implying that it's not the best thing ever created consequently becomes a personal insult.
Google and Microsoft tried to replicate that kind of brand love but were thankfully unsuccessful for the most part, so you'll always get an incredible amount of comments on anything related to Apple.
Is this supposed to be a joke? _Most_, so over 50% of the people on HN work/worked for Apple or hold Apple stock? That’s absurd.
I think at least some of the "apologism" and "distraction" comes from more honest ideological differences though - like what should the role of the state be, what is a free market, should business be fair, how much consumer protection is the right amount...
Too late, I'm afraid. Apple has pulled a really smart trick against the tons of paper written by EU commissioners.
The legal system doesn't like tricks, a "yes but I did X in a really clever way so it's not X" defence doesn't usually work.
https://www.ft.com/content/d2f7328c-5851-4f16-8f8d-93f0098b6...
They aren’t making any policy changes relating to storage.
Apple have been progressively locking down methods websites use to persistently track people for privacy reasons. All forms of permanent storage (e.g. cookies, local storage) are limited to a seven day lifetime unless the user interacts with that website / web app. If the user keeps visiting the website / web app at least once a week, the storage remains.
Another thing Apple have been doing is using the act of installing a PWA as a signal that it should be trusted more than anything you happen to come across in a browser. So the seven day lifecycle doesn’t apply to PWAs that you install to the home screen.
What is happening now is that because PWAs installed to the home screen are no longer available in the EU, people use those PWAs through a web browser. And due to this, the seven days lifetime without user interaction starts to apply.
It’s a problem, but this specific thing isn’t a recent policy change from Apple regarding storage, it’s fallout from PWAs not having the elevated privileges from being installed to the home screen.
https://webkit.org/blog/9521/intelligent-tracking-prevention...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Storage_API...
> Safari proactively evicts data when cross-site tracking prevention is turned on. If an origin has no user interaction, such as click or tap, in the last seven days of browser use, its data created from script will be deleted. Cookies set by server are exempt from this eviction.
It doesn't matter what the data actually is or whether it is used to track users. Safari deletes it.
It's a policy change that impacts storage and has the practical effect that PWAs on iOS in the EU have had the persistent storage feature removed with no replacement.
Seems fair to gloss that as "Removing persistent storage."
I agree. It has a knock-on effect. But their storage policy hasn’t changed, a different policy has.
> Seems fair to gloss that as "Removing persistent storage."
The problem is when you try to determine their intent from the misunderstanding that they have changed their policy specifically regarding storage. They haven’t done this. Their storage policy is the same as it has been for years.
> I think removing persistent storage and the ability to add websites to the home screen makes it obvious what their strategy is.
Inferring their motives from a policy change that hasn’t taken place is pointless.
This would have been a reasonable thing to say:
> I think removing the ability to add websites to the home screen makes it obvious what their strategy is.
Specifically referring to the removal of persistent storage as if it were a policy change they are currently enacting is counterfactual.
I'm sure McKee would argue for the exact opposite! Organisations are run by individuals, and it is their character that is revealed. The greedy assholery is the front they have to assume to uphold their fiduciary duty to shareholders, but their true character is what happens underneath – the thing revealed under pressure.
And in this, we see large variation.
So it is not about Apple being exceptionally good but rather them going out of their way to be exceptionally asshole-ish.
edit: Also, in some cases you lose warranty.
On Android, with Android 12, we can now have apps on neostore (fdroid frontend) auto update. There is no good reason to defend apple here. You as a user are always free to not install third party app stores.
...I do right now. So that isn't a fact. It's a myth.
There are a number of scary warnings to click through but that's it. Not great for security but the official distribution is good enough that it's not a problem outside a few select countries where doing business is hard.
Android out of the box is fairly close to jailbroken iOS. Very few things require root.
More likely to be iOS apologists looking for a narrative, they try it out and proclaim that it works, but have no intention to actually use their side loaded test app, so they don't even realize it only looked like it worked.
I don't believe you. I believe that you probably left out some crucial detail, such as having to own a Mac first.
If they intentionally prevent a third party Xcode-compatible implementation from existing, that’s monopolistic behavior. If they don’t want to provide it themselves, it’s a rightful business choice and theirs to make, in my book.
If you think sales of macs are affected in a measurable way by the fact that xcode runs on it you are delusional.
Android builds work on that same mac too.
And you still can't share that app.
Most professional iOS developers use these kinds of services. They are totally commonplace and not against Apple’s terms in the slightest.
Build servers are absolutely fine.
Oh and up until 2019 apple was forbidding any virtualization of macOS in its EULA, there certainly were no free cloud build servers for iOS since relatively recently.
There definitely were. Bitrise had a free plan back in 2014 and they weren’t the only ones.
https://web.archive.org/web/20141103031325/http://www.bitris...
Are you an iOS developer? Because you are repeatedly taking what is considered run of the mill by iOS developers as if it were some outlandish concept you’ve never heard of before. Build servers – yes, with free tiers – have been commonplace for iOS apps for at least a decade.
NOBODY DEVELOPS iOS APPS BY ONLY BUILDING IN THE CLOUD. NEITHER PROFESSIONALS NOR HOBBYISTS. NOBODY ON EARTH. Every iOS developer has a mac, because it's impossible to develop when you can only build 200 times per month (per your link). Yes, professional developers run some CI in the cloud, nobody cares.
> It's just nonsensical to use a device that dictates what you can install on it. Well, Androids don't come with root permissions either ( you should be able to get it easily if you want imo ) but at least you can install any app, even just create your own.
I’m approaching this in the context of side loading (the “you can install any app” part). Other people in the thread have as well:
> If we're getting technical you don't need to jailbreak to sideload on iOS either. AltStore automates the tedium but you can side load just fine on iOS too (for now).
In case you are unaware, it’s somewhat popular to register Apple developer accounts to build and run apps that aren’t on the App Store. That’s what AltStore is all about.
If you don’t have a Mac, you can use a build server for this. Build servers are incredibly common and have been for many years. They haven’t just popped up in the last couple of years.
I see now that you aren’t talking about this at all; you are talking about developing apps. In that context, I agree. You wouldn’t normally use a service like that as a substitute for a development machine (although a very small number of people do actually do this!). But I wasn’t talking about that. I was talking about the side loading case.
Nevertheless, you don’t need “a multithousand dollar apple machine” at all, even for development. I believe the cheapest machine you can buy from Apple brand new that lets you develop and submit an app to the App Store is the 9th gen iPad at 329 USD. Or, if you insist upon a computer, the Mac mini at 599 USD. And of course you don’t have to buy new, so the actual cost of the machine you need is significantly lower than that.
Seriously??? I am not a mobile developer, but that statement is totally bullshit.
I regularly code for 20-60min between running a build.
I highly doubt I get anywhere close to 200 builds a month on all of my hobby projects combined. Obviously work is a different story, but that’s what paid plans are for.
This is getting silly.
I don't know where you get these rumors from honestly.
I’ve heard many, many times that free accounts have a short expiry. I thought it was seven days, and I’ve just checked, and I remembered the duration correctly.
I can’t find an official source, but people mention this limit practically everywhere the topic is discussed. Here’s one reference, Google can help you find many, many more:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/73014888/8427
> Without Official Apple Dev Account
> If you don't have an official Apple Dev Account provisioning will only last for 1 week. The app will expire every 7 days (or less in some cases -- depending upon the day the initial certificate was created).
> With Official Apple Dev Account
> You will be able to provision your app for up to 1 year.
Can you create a provisioning profile with an expiry more than one week into the future with a free account?
The fact that desktop and server Linux distros still have a root account, have sudo, or said binaries is evidence of how far behind they are in terms of security.
Final, ultimate control must always be vested somewhere. Your argument is that it's "more secure" for it to be in the hands of a profit-seeking corporation than in the hands that are holding the device.
Yes. The identity a company like Apple is known and trusted. The person holding a device is not a known identity. This is unrelated to not having sudo though. Take for example the ping command. There is no reason why the user must have access to an account that has ultimate control over the device to use ping. ping should be possible to be used by a normal user. This could be implemented with a ping daemon that run with a dedicated user that has the capability to use raw sockets, and then normal users have a ping client that talks to such daemon. You can come up with everything someone would need root for and define a more secure way to offer that functionality to the user.
Yes, they're both shitty in a number of ways. And while is is easier to root Android devices than it is to root iOS ones, last I checked you were still dependent on the vendor kernel and parts of the vendor display server on Android because not all of the necessary drivers and related config are upstreamed (and the lack of TIVO clauses in GPLv2 makes this possible) - meaning replacing 95% of userspace doesn't actually get you very far if your issue is not being able to trust the vendor.
I choose Apple because:
1. Apple is primarily a hardware company. When I buy their hardware, I am their customer. When they make noises about protecting my privacy, I am reasonably confident that very few parts of the business are working to undermine that. OTOH, Google is an advertising company. When I buy their hardware, my eyeballs become their product, which they rent out to their real customers, the advertisers. When they make noises about protecting my privacy, I see that as mostly marketing BS (or, "puffery") which large parts of their business are working to undermine.
2. My phone is not my primary computing device. I have a laptop running GNU/Linux that I use for most of my computing needs, including web browsing, email, and software development. I am fine with my mobile phone being an "appliance" that I use mostly for instant messaging, and occasionally checking the news and weather, taking photos, or making short temporary notes that I will (manually) transfer to my laptop later. And sometimes, even, making phone calls. But I generally stay away from "apps". No, I don't want to install your fucking app, no matter which device it would be on. Just make sure your website works.
Given those factors, I have an Apple phone.
That's not to say Apple is for everyone. My priorities are not everyone else's, and that's fine. Different people have different tradeoffs. If an Android device works better for you, that's great.
Apple still make the vast majority of their revenue from hardware. All of their service revenue combined is only about 20% of their revenue.
Grandparent is claiming that Apple aren’t a hardware company any more. Pointing out that the vast majority of their income comes from hardware is totally relevant.
Apple brings in hundreds of billions from selling hardware every year. They are definitely still a hardware company.
Apple has passed the event horizon of extracting profits now.
It’s not though. Apple are bringing in hundreds of billions of dollars every year from hardware. That’s not a means to an end, that is the end itself.
Apple are a hardware company. It’s bizarre that you are trying to argue otherwise. They make more money from selling consumer hardware than practically every other company in the world.
You are definitely correct in that Apple are a hardware company.
However (and I think this is the point of disagreement) much of their revenue growth (and presumably profits, but that's harder to assess) comes from services, and from a stock price perspective revenue/profit growth is what matters (you're only as good as your last quarter and all that).
Understanding this is key to understanding lots of Apple's business decisions recently (my favourite was destroying the business model of their competitors using ATT and then refusing to declare their own ad business ATT compliant).
I appreciate you trying to steel-man their argument, but you’ve gone far enough that it doesn’t reflect what they were actually saying. The thing I’m disagreeing with is:
> Apple's no longer a hardware company
There’s no way to spin that into anything resembling reality. If they had said what you are saying, I wouldn’t have objected.
> my favourite was destroying the business model of their competitors using ATT and then refusing to declare their own ad business ATT compliant
It doesn’t really make sense to do so. Apple aren’t an unseen third-party; the user has explicitly chosen to use their products and services. Why would ATT apply here?
Just to clarify, ATT is where Apple says that apps can’t collect data on you and share it with other companies without your permission.
When somebody buys and uses an iPhone, they are clearly making an active choice to be an Apple user. Apple can use their data.
When somebody installs a third-party app Foo, they are clearly making an active choice to be a Foo user. Foo can use their data.
But then Foo adds the Facebook SDK to their app. This is invisible to the user. They haven’t made a choice to be a Facebook user. They don’t even know it’s happening. When Facebook gets their data because they use the Foo application, it’s happening without the user’s knowledge or consent.
ATT doesn’t ban Facebook from tracking them, it just says that the user needs to be asked first. It’s putting Facebook’s access to data on the same level of consent as Apple and the apps people choose to use.
Apple using your tracking data in their own ad business doesn’t violate that norm. The data isn’t being sent to an unknown third-party. Apple says:
> The Apple advertising platform does not track you, nor does it buy or share your personal information with other companies.
— https://www.apple.com/sg/privacy/control/
Do you have reason to believe this is a lie? Because if it’s the truth, then Apple are playing by the same rules as everybody else.
And they're really not playing by the same rules as everyone else given that they own the platform that all this activity takes place on, so they get basically all iOS users data without needing any permission dialogue.
This is literally part of their ad sales pitch and ads is the fastest growing part of the services business.
So maybe they don't do all this stuff now (but they don't need to because they receive installs and conversions by the very nature of running the platform).
Like, google could make the same claim Apple make here and it would be true for Android.
When BMW is gatekeeping features behind subscriptions, is that also irrelevant because they're a car company? We shouldn't just stop discussing it.
I was saying that the difference between revenue and profit is irrelevant for the purpose of this argument. You’re now trying to draw an analogy with what I said and gatekeeping features behind subscriptions, which is not what I called irrelevant.
The analogous situation is if you said BMW were no longer a car company for doing so, and I’d disagree with that as well. Apple makes tonnes of money selling hardware, BMW makes tonnes of money selling cars. Apple is still a hardware company and BMW is still a car company.
Why?
A few weeks ago I was also stuck in a situation where he appeared to play dumb and refused to acknowledge the contradictions in his positions and the level of indignation that followed afterwards was unbelievable.
> this also isn’t a legitimate difference of opinion scenario.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39026820
You were being unreasonable and insulting. If you are going to continue to act like that, how about we stay out of each other’s way? Don’t drag this thread down into a flamewar as well.
Of course Apple tries to squeeze out of this system as possible at different fronts.
That's where government laws come in, to make the playing field more even.
Xbox, PS, iPad are consoles. Not everyone wants to DIY the OS and app config and maintenance. Using (digital) cartridges gets all those non value added activities out of the way of just playing the game or using the app.
Also, given how often you need to change phones (given build quality), if I have important data and you're a web app, I rather the server be the source of truth, and the phone a cache (so I don't loose data when the phone breaks).
Those browsers could have implemented the Home-PWA functionality while maintaining your ability to install plugins such as adblockers within that PWA's context.
Apple has made this impossible by removing the OS APIs that allowed "Installed" (home-)PWAs entirely. This is just so they aren't forced to allow these under a different browser engine.
Of course, this is all done because "think of the children" (i.e.: think of the poor people ticked into using a non-privacy-respecting browser to run their PWAs).
There's reasons to want either, but as a heavy user of PWAs for a few online services / communities, I much prefer the former in most cases.
I use the Outlook PWA. It’s great because I don’t have to let my company manage (part of) my phone.
I’m only on home screen 2 of 5 and oh my, it’s almost all of the apps. Granted, some would perform worse in some ways. Some could not realize all features (like automatic photo upload). More integration (like sharing to PWAs) would be needed. But some others? Yeah. Why even develop an app?
This isn't to say some web apps don't have ads, but then again so do some native apps.
Also there is nothing stopping extensions to work for PWAs. They do on Chrome desktop and you can disable/enable extensions per app. Not an Android user (yet) so I don't know how is it on mobile.
But that's it. Once my current iPhone breaks (and I took my protector off), I'm not buying another one. This is malicious compliance at the expense of user.
Xbox Gamepass presumably would be the largest one/best example, is that how they ask people on iOS to stream games?
The natural response to that is to make a PWA if Apple says you're not good enough for the store. Now that option is going away, so I can understand if people who previously relied on it are ticked off.
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#min...
> 4.2 Minimum Functionality
> Your app should include features, content, and UI that elevate it beyond a repackaged website. If your app is not particularly useful, unique, or “app-like,” it doesn’t belong on the App Store. If your App doesn’t provide some sort of lasting entertainment value or adequate utility, it may not be accepted.
Think about it a little harder. If Apple says "only bikes are allowed in their bike store, and if you want to build something else, go put your product in a different store", then you said OK fine and proceeded to build a bike and put it in another store, does that make sense?
Apple would've accepted your bike. Websites and web apps are treated differently in Apple's rules.
Understand that Apple has used this rule to keep web based apps out of the app store, but they got burned on that and there's no such restriction today.
Apple just introduced a lot of PWA feature on Desktop Safari on the last WWDC, and improvements on iOS like web-push were introduced with iOS 16.4 just less than 1 year ago [0]. The impact can't be that big for stuff Apple just released recently. And now they are killing it outright again.
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
(...)
Of course Apple could've acted earlier out of the goodness of their hearts and to serve customer interests (lol), but like with the GDPR, companies tend to prepare longer and only launch their changes right when they're about to see any real risk. The end of the fair warning period is the final deadline.
Microsoft and Google are doing the same thing, I think it's to be expected with regulation like this, and the regulation was designed for this.
My iPhone 7 was my daily driver for 5 years and was only retired because I got an offer that was too good to pass up.
And then there’s also the degrading storage on many Android phones. They just become sooooo slow. My iPhone 7 is slow now, too. After 7 years, not after 3.
> And then there’s also the degrading storage on many Android phones
Citation needed.
It's entirely possible this is "fixed" nowadays, because flash/UFS technology has progressed and/or device makers are finally using slightly less crappy components.
I don’t really care about my phone as a general purpose computer.
Where the rubber hits the road for this one is what developers do. IMO the answer is to go all in on web apps. Make it obvious to the user that it’s Apple degrading the experience.
At this point of the game, all Apple will understand is churn. And it is churn. They are rent seekers.
shouldn't this be "$1600/hr" ?
But of course this seems to be a personal blog, so much of it is up to personal taste, as it should be.
Do you remember when ai used to stand for 'artificial insemination'? Lol.
And there is a simple solution too: just offer multiple browsers in the appstore.
If only Apple just removed them from Safari, and allowed other browsers to compete...
Do people actually want PWAs?
In my experience the answer is a resounding “NO”.
Android supports PWAs but they aren’t taking the world by storm. My Android friends don’t use any that I’m aware of and if you ask them about it they just get a blank look on the faces.
Heck, businesses don’t care about PWAs or websites even. I work in this space, I’ve written well over 10 cross platform apps (web/iOS/Android) and not only do they not care about PWAs but they don’t care much about the web. It’s the same codebase and normally we get the web version up and running first so we tell them they can start playing with it on their phone in the browser. They literally do not even open it until we provide the app version to them. I know because only once there is an app do we hear _any_ feedback. No matter how many times we tell them it’s the same, that they can start doing user acceptance testing or QA early, or to just check the UI/colors to make sure it’s what they want. They don’t care until it’s an app.
This gives away that you are not a regular consumer.
If you ask differently: do you want apps that install almost instantly, and take almost no space on your phone? A lot of people would be interested.
Renting a scooter or charging an EV tends to require native apps for no good reason. These apps can be 100MB+ large, and it's infuriating to install them when paying for roaming, or being somewhere in the middle-of-nowhere where it takes ages to download. The QR-code-linked page that merely redirects to an app store could have been the app itself!
Of course, an efficiently-coded webpage (e.g. no JS-heavy libs) could also work, with arguably less hassle all-around. But native apps do tend to "feel" nicer.
I’ve seen App Clip in the wild only once, and it was a barely functional stop-gap-app that asked me to download the full app to finish the registration :/
I assume that the proposition of making a second app, Apple-only, which has even more restrictions and technical challenges than regular apps, is just not economical to catch on.
JS is often bloated, but there’s a lot of tooling for diagnosing and fixing the problem. There are libraries that care about size. Minified JS is pretty dense anyway.
Swift and its frameworks can easily be as bloated, but it’s harder to inspect bloat in compiled code. Languages with generics aren’t easier to keep in check than JS. You can easily accidentally multiply your code when it’s monomorphized, or prevent dead code removal when it’s not. It’s easy to find iOS apps that are 10x larger than a bloated website.
Zigzagscrolling is an insult to the audience.
To partially fix, open dev tools and change the body tag's display:grid to display:block. I'm not sure how you can stuff up a single column HTML article, but they've managed to.
Press the little book icon (or F9 in Firefox desktop), it fixes this just as it fixes so many other unreadable web sites.
Luckily our clients aren't completely strangled yet so this still works. How meta considering the subject.
If iOS supported other browsers then you could read it in a Chromium based browser, where it appears completely readable.
iOS Safari does support extensions. I've got a handful installed on my phone right now, including Userscripts to apply custom formatting and styling to this website.
What Apple is doing sucks, for sure, but let’s not lose sight of reality and make stuff up or misinform people.
You can’t, and this is basically the top extension anyone wants, and so your blanket statement is also misinforming
It’s not like Safari can’t do ad blocking. It can, and solutions like 1Blocker are quite capable. It can even block at the system level, which is more than uBlock Origin in the browser does.
Either way, none of this is relevant to your first comment. Extensions aren’t even necessary for the original complaint. Please don’t move the goalposts.
And yes I agree with your example, I would no longer say chrome does extensions as a blanket statement. I’d say it has restricted extension functionality.
I use Wipr, and it’s been better than the beloved uBlock has ever been.
Don’t take my word as an iOS dev for it, the fact that a bunch of effective ad blockers exist, one of which I use and just told you about, directly refutes your claim.
Since Alex is here in the comments, I'm sure he'd reply if he had fixed something between each of us reading it.
How about: aPWAcalypse
FruitCo and the Chocolate Factory will never allow computer users to protect themselves from FruitCo and the Chocolate Factory. "Trust" is assumed. It's not like they ever ask you, "Do you want to trust us?"
Of course, you can always give up and ignore the threat. You can claim you trust one of these companies. You can wax on about how one is better than the other. But the threat remains. They can do whatever they want, no matter how irrational or "evil", and we are watching them do so in real-time. It did not take much to get them to show their true colors. What if business were to really get worse. Imagine what they could do. They could set new levels for douchebag behaviour. Unstoppable.
Well, if nobody wants to play with our total clusterfuck of inconsistent APIs, we might as well drop support for them >:(
Besides, I heard the 'simple' web apps still can have a place on the homescreen. Can anybody with an iPhone tell me if that works like the video from the article? Is it just with an address bar?
Only PWAs can offer a true app-like experience.
> Only PWAs can offer a true app-like experience.
If one's definition of an app requires push notifications and local storage.
I get the d!ck move from Apple, but web apps can be way simpler without push notifications and storage on a server under your control. To me personally, push notifications and local storage are overrated.
Else iOS would be like macOS, with every second app from a major vendor people need to run (for work, school, banking, etc) would be the equivalent of an Electron monstrocity.
Apparently that's the dream of the author.
[1] never got anywhere near close to run out of space on iOS because of apps (at 50+ apps installed). Besides the big offenders space-wise are not general apps and their code dependencies, but games with huge asset libraries.
Companies aren't going to magically switch to a ios-compatible framework or language, it's cheaper to keep just web devs and hire one guy that knows how to package an electron app.
I'm not sure there that many doing "add to home screen PWAs" in the first place, for them to be "going back".
"Add to home screen PWAs" were used by users (not many either) for convenient access to this or that website they've used, but weren't ever a major app delivery use case in iOS. So, I see the whole post more like much ado about nothing.
And while companies do just package webkit (or use system webkit) + some web app framework as iOS native apps, iOS still encourages developing proper native apps.
Which I'm all for. If Slack, VS Code and co could be forced to create fully native apps on the desktop too, I'd jump at the chance of replacing their Electron stuff with those.
I know, I already covered all that.
>They only change how apps are deployed. Hence, your whole point about "better quality apps by banning PWAs" is completely wrong.
I didn't say banning PWAs will result in better quality apps in general. I said:
(1) "Add to home screen PWAs" are not that used in the first place.
(2) "PWAs wrapped as native apps" are, but iOS encourages native apps more.
(3) Giving more parity to PWAs (going the opposite route of the current removal) will encourage them to be used more, which I don't particularly like, for the same reason I don't like Electron (including iOS wrapped-PWAs).
These (web) apps as PWAs would offer a better interface and more capabilities than a pure in-browser web app, but they lack the resources to provide a truly native app.
Banning PWAs doesn't encourage native apps, but even shittier web apps. I'd bet 90% of web apps wrapped in Cordova are there only because they need a) local storage and b) push notifications.