That might be true for the tech giants but it’s not true in the typical case. In our case, we didn’t care which platform people used, and if anything, the owners of the apps preferred people to use the web because many of them were selling subscription services and didn’t want to hand over 15% to the app stores.

“Getting data on people” is just not that attractive for most apps. Are Reddit motivated by things like that? Sure. But it’s just not that valuable for everybody else.

You know what is attractive? Giving customers what they want. And customers want native apps.

But people are used to that now being the normal state of things, it's rare that they even try the browser -- I develop an application that is web only and typically used on desktops, and people incessantly ask me for "an app so they can use it on their phone".

They probably want an icon to open your app. They probably dont know the difference between an app rendered with a browser or a truly native app. In the past apple as made it difficult for users to know how to do this and users just know about the app store. Great for apple (walled garden) and social media apps (more tracking, unlimited ads) but not great for users.

> In the past apple as made it difficult for users to know how to do this

The mechanism to add a web app to the home screen has remained pretty unchanged from iPhoneOS 1.0 (2007) to iOS 18 (2024) – you tap the action button (sometimes called the “share” button despite it being a misnomer), then you tap “Add to Home Screen”. It’s the same as adding a bookmark, printing, or sharing the link with somebody.

That is the process they designed before the App Store existed when they were telling everybody if you want to build apps for the iPhone then they should be web apps, so I don’t think you can reasonably consider this process to be intentionally difficult.

This changed slightly in iOS 26 because you need to tap the meatball icon to bring up the menu and pick “Share…”, but given that this only happened six months ago, I don’t think that’s what you were referring to by “in the past”?

Yes, that's the "workaround" I use but by default people are expecting to find something in the app store.

> They probably dont know the difference between an app rendered with a browser or a truly native app.

Absolutely, users do not know or care what technology you are using so long as it meets their expectations of use. Users are going to the app store as a discovery mechanism for "something that gives them an icon on the phone to get to that thing", most have no clue what "native code" means.