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I’ve been thinking about open source replacements of proprietary companion apps. It’s easy enough to reverse engineer Bluetooth protocols now, but you can’t run these in websites. Putting stuff on the App Store is too expensive but sideloading could be viable.

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Side*note: I really hope we can move away from the term "sideloading" which makes it sound like we're doing something on the down low.

Installing something is a perfectly normal operation - it's the App Store that's the special case :).

Direct Install, or better yet, Owner Controlled Install.

Lets call it what it is.

Yes, how about just "loading"?

Ages ago there was this term "Device Neutrality", first introduced in 2011 at the European Parliament and later incorporated in the Digital Markets Act

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_neutrality

I guess Apple prefered the pejorative "sideloading"

You actually can use most bluetooth apis in websites on most browsers outside of iOS [0]. I used recently this tool [1] to program my baofeng radio and the bluetooth aspect of it worked great, but I did end up having to reverse engineer aspects of the payload to get it encode and decode all the channel configuration correctly.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Bluetoo...

[1] https://dz0ny.github.io/5r-mini-ble-tool/

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