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Comment by senko | Hacker News Reader

As @Apocryphon comments in a subthread, there's a commodification of app developers.

With iOS, Apple has crossed the threshold of who needs who. Now app developers need Apple way more than Apple needs them.

In many cases, one app to do thing X is mostly as good as another app for the same X. There's no bargaining power to be had unless you're a huge name.

As a developer, you're not leaving the App Store unless you're leaving mobile app development entirely. It'd be commercial suicide (for most) to do that.

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This remains true for the moment. But discontent among developers are cracks in the foundation. The building can weather that for a time because it's mighty and huge. But those cracks are the beginning of the eventual end. If not cared for, will hasten its demise.

Maybe.

The level of control both Google and Apple have in their mobile OS' (only Safari engine being allowed on iOS is an example) makes it much harder for something else entirely to grow outside their ecosystem and them slam them from the left flank, like the web did to MS' dominance.

I'm not entering into the debate whether such technical restrictions are have good (and benign) reasons, but they absolutely keep the control much tighter than it used to be the case on the desktop in Windows heyday.

Nah, you can build a PWA that more or less acts entirely like a mobile app and get out of the app store game entirely.

Not as a counter-argument, but I would be curious to find out if there are any big commercial successes that targeted mobile niche but were implemented as a web app.

I can't think of any.

Amazon’s app is made up of mostly web views, and so are a lot of others. Apple doesn’t give web apps all the features (e.g. push notifications) as native apps, so it behooves companies to continue using at least native wrappers.

It's still a native app and must play by Apple's rules - for example on monetization.

The fact that it uses a subset of web technologies that Apple deems acceptable is a technical detail.

The only example I can think of is a recent one: Wordle.

Which is the insightful reason Apple pivoted away from first class web apps in iOS' early days. They realized they'd never be able to control and tax them as with native. Technical pros and cons were ancillary.

Except Apple is making it impossible for web apps to compete with natives apps by crippling Safari with bugs and not implementing crucial features like push notifications, while banning competing browser engines who could do so. So no, currently web apps are no alternative to native apps on the iPhone.

When regulation comes in to force Apple to lift their anti-competitive practices though... Developers and companies will definitely flock to the web, for many good reasons, just like they did on desktop.

As a consumer I much prefer most app’s web version than polluting my phone with their native stuff.

The lack of notifications is actually one of the biggest reasons. Many app developers abuse notifications so much that I’d rather check uber eats tracking screen every 3 minutes than enable notifications for that app

> not implementing crucial features like push notifications

Thank goodness.

I don’t need to add de-cluttering my parents’ phones with respect to every website they’ve visited in a year to my Christmas tradition of unfucking the family’s devices. If I want notifications from a website, I’ll give them my phone number or email.

> implementing crucial features like push notifications

Push notifications are a fucking cancer. It's bad enough disabling them from native apps but I definitely do not want web apps sending them. For every one legitimate user of push notifications there are a hundred (conservative estimate) spam/junk users.

It will be interesting to see if that happens or not.

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