And the irony of this is that a lot of the apps in the app store are hybrid apps that are basically web apps with a thin native wrapper around them because it's just so much less of a hassle to develop for both iOS and Android that way and because, if you're coming at it as an outsider, Swift is such a ball-ache to deal with compared to other languages and stacks.

So PWAs would have been more than fine but, unfortunately, that ship has long since sailed, and Apple make way too much money out of the app store for a course change.

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raw_anon_1111 8 hours ago | parent [-]

It came out in the Epic vs Apple trial that 90% of App Store revenue comes from in app purchases of pay to win games. The only money Apple is making from these “could have been a web app” apps are for things like Uber where you can use Apple Pay (not in app purchases)- that has the same credit card fees regardless.

If it’s only mean old Apple, where are all of the great Android PWAs and why do developers decide to make native Android apps?

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bartread 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Nah, the hyrid thing has been a big deal for a long time. PhoneGap/Cordova was all the rage in 2012/13 when I was working in that area, and I even went to a VSIP event hawking our Visual Studio hybrid development solution.

Once hybrid became possible it was immediately clear that it was the easiest way to get a decent quality app deployed on both iOS and Android. It was a big enough deal that around the time I attended that VSIP event and then PhoneGap Europe, or perhaps shortly afterward, some backlash against hybrid started off with a few big companies trumpeting about how they'd started off native, gone to hybrid for a few years, and were now going back to native again (principally for native experience and performance reasons).

But I think the pressure has always been in the hybrid direction, particularly if you're resource or budget constrained and need to target both platforms, or the web is your main platform (whether than be mobile or desktop). I'm sure the Epic vs Apple fight didn't do any harm, but I don't know what real difference it's made.

The reality is that maintaining two native apps plus a web app is a pain in the ass, especially when you realise Swift - whilst a good language - is a wrapper over some decidedly tedious APIs and a lot of Objective C legacy that you probably don't want sucking up a lot of time. If you want/need apps, it's so much easier to stick a native wrapper around a responsive web app, and that will work well for so many use cases. Not all, by any means, but most SaaS, LOB, or CRUDy apps will do fine as hybrid.

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dogmatism 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

answer: adblocking in the browser (and other data scavenging which can be done with native app more easily than PWA)

	▲	raw_anon_1111 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		What “data scavenging” can be done with an iOS app without the user explicitly giving the app permission?