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Is anything stopping people from going all-in HTML5 and not even worry about having a presence in the app store?

Sadly, Apple almost seems to purposefully keeps mobile Safari buggy for HTML5 apps. You might think, why not install Firefox or Chrome on iOS then? Well, turns out Apple only allows those apps to use an outdated version of Safari as their browser engine.

Here's a regression that appeared in iOS 10, which affects HTML5 games. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37808180/disable-viewpor...

Apple almost seems to purposefully keeps mobile Safari buggy for HTML5 apps

Then your HTML5 app is broken.

Back before there was an App Store, when all "apps" were web apps, I wrote one of the first non-Apple weather apps for the iPhone. It included animated radar, weather alerts, hurricane tracking, and even streaming audio from a real meteorologist. And this was more than a decade ago, on bog-standard launch-day iPhones. It was even featured by Apple back when it had a directory of iPhone web apps.

Mobile web apps could be really incredible with today's technology, if so many of them weren't crammed with unnecessary/lazy/stupid garbage.

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