> The fundamental problem with the internet is that hosting sucks and no one wants to do it. It's thankless and it's expensive to maintain, both time and money. Apps are a way to not worry about that.

No it's not. Hosting a web app is one of the most trivial things you can do these days, far more trivial than attempting to get an app into the app store. Hosting API's and Databases is a little more difficult but you still need those things if you're building an app.

There is no world in which getting your app signed, getting it approved, getting every update approved and paying $X/year to Apple or Google is easier than hosting a webapp, even if you host it in the most difficult way possible (on say AWS + Cloudfront). And even that method isn't that difficult, just moreso relative to other ways of hosting a webapp.

No, the fundamental problem is ios. There are a bunch of features that ios locks down so that you are essentially forced to use apps. Want to send push notifications? You need an app. Want to be able to wake your app up in the background to do stuff intermittently? You need an app. Want to get your app on the home screen? Once again, you need an app. And before anyone says you can do this with PWAs, yes, that's true. But the steps required from your users in order to get a PWA running on ios are so cumbersome (by design) that nobody even bothers. And since ios has something like 60% of market share in the US, we're stuck with apps.

> The fundamental problem with the internet is that hosting sucks and no one wants to do it. It's thankless and it's expensive to maintain, both time and money. Apps are a way to not worry about that.

Except it seems like plenty of apps these days are just vehicles to give web-based services some native abilities, so they're practically useless without a data connection.

I love hosting and I will never stop doing it. I keep buying servers (second hand; almost no one actually needs the latest) and hosting 1000s of companies.

Simply hosting a front-end only app is almost free on several platforms (e.g. Cloudflare). Certainly less than the $99 Apple developer membership fee. It starts getting more expensive once you add back-end servers and databases and whatnot, but you’d be needing those with the App-approach too if your featureset requires that.

Not to mention dealing with authentication, securing user data, and opening yourself to being a target for hackers.

Shipping a local app eliminates a lot of those headaches.

Well if you're calling an API you host yourself to populate that said UI, not needing to host that UI as a webpage is not that much of an advantage.

How many free and easy options do you want me to list?

What the hell?

Make your website static and host it on a CDN. There's nothing expensive or thankless about it.

Stop over engineering.

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