Why would you not just make this a webpage, and then the users could add it to home page as if it were an app? no Apple review necessary then. What does it being an app give you besides bureaucratic headaches?
2. Those people and many more besides have no idea what "add it to home page" even means.
It being an app gives those people an experience that matches their normal use of technology, and I think they're probably a majority of users.
Plus, if the parent feels like making an app instead of a web page, who is Apple (or you, or I) to discourage that?
If Apple supported the beforeinstallprompt event (available in Chrome since 2015) then people would have same experience as installing app [0]. Instead, you must create a wrapper around webpage and submit thru App Store.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/befo...
There is a web version (it's Flutter so it was easy to make one), but parents use the app much more often.
Source: consulted for a company that had a PWA and paid me a lot of money to make it a native app because their users didn't know how to use the PWA.
Also, in the EU it just opens the site up in your browser, no lack of browser UI like you'd expect. Apple is wonderful.
Edit: It seems I never got the news they reversed course on that particular idea of theirs.
Your point about users not being used to this is very real. I didn’t know you could until some app author showed me.
It really is as simple as sharing a link or copy-pasting, but if you don’t know it’s a think, it disappears into obscurity in the menus.
There's still this funny business: https://developer.apple.com/support/alt-distribution-ux-in-t... & https://developer.apple.com/support/dma-and-apps-in-the-eu
Unfortunately some other features are only available to PWA do it's a tradeoff either way.
No url bar, no back/forward, no tabs, nor translation, no menu bar, no loading indicator, just… pressing down on a link shows the target url and offers open, copy link, add to reading list and share -which honestly looks like a weird oversight.
It’s not a PWA because the UX is just always inferior. Even though we’ve come really far in browser UIs, the browser is still very clunky compared to the smoothness of a native app.
And I like nice to use software.