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.
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?
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.
https://thenewstack.io/50-years-ago-a-young-bill-gates-took-...
Perens had accepted a position as senior Linux/Open Source Global Strategist for Hewlett-Packard, which he describes as leaving Apple “to work on Open Source. So I asked Steve: ‘You still don’t believe in this Linux stuff, do you?'” And Perens still remembers how Steve Jobs had responded.
“I’ve had a lot to do with building two of the world’s three great operating systems” — which Jobs considered to be NeXT OS, MacOS and Windows. “‘And it took a billion-dollar lab to make each one. So no, I don’t think you can do this.'”
Perens says he later "won that argument" when Jobs stood onstage in front of a slide that said ‘Open Source: We Think It’s Great!’ as he introduced the Safari browser."
While yes some software have come in that format, it took the big 3 to push the server Linux based clouds, Google to push it on phone, tablets and laptops and now Steam to make a push for the average gamer.
This is not to discredit the work being done outside those lab's which very much build on the work for free or by foundations, however the first versions just don't capture a majority of the available markets which the OSes Jobs mention very much did and the others by the billion dollar labs since.
What has been shown is that it takes billions of dollars to market an OS to the general public.
Doesnt really sound like Jobs was putting up much of a fight there.
Before Apple’s App Store launched, my iPhone was running all sorts of other apps and alternative launchers.
Apple had to move fast to keep things from getting too out of control.
Over the years, as the vulnerabilities in the OS were closed and iOS added features, the need or desire to bother with jailbreaks and 3rd party pirate app stores dropped. I haven’t thought about it in many years.