Something which developers have widely refused to embrace despite being pushed by Steve Jobs himself during the iPhone keynote.
Yet somehow it's always Apple holding it back with their magical minority market share.
People have forgotten what a big deal that keynote was and what it meant for the mobile web. Go back and pay attention to the “desktop class web browser” stuff. Apple almost singlehandedly changed the mobile web from something almost nobody wanted, into something actually useful and mainstream. And Steve Jobs was there right from the start telling everybody if they wanted to build applications for the iPhone, they should be mobile web applications. It was everybody else demanding that iPhone applications be native, not web-based.
Before the iPhone was released, a typical mobile web experience was a separate site that barely worked and didn’t use any normal browser technologies. Along come Apple, who do a tonne of work to make their open-source WebKit work well on mobile, and virtually overnight all smartphones adopted WebKit to catch up with them.
Anybody who doesn’t think Apple has done more to advance the mobile web than practically any other organisation should be forced to build WAP/WML mobile sites until they repent.
They didn’t do it alone of course – WebKit was originally based upon KHTML, and I believe Nokia also had a WebKit-based mobile browser. But Apple put a tremendous amount of work into it and the dramatic shift from “the mobile web is shitty and worthless” to “the mobile web is actually useful” happened almost straight away as a direct result. Nobody wanted mobile websites / mobile web applications before the iPhone came out, then all of a sudden it was a normal requirement for a site to work well on mobile.
There have certainly been functions that were necessary for some kinds of apps, but there are possibilities for kinds of PWAs that would have worked for years on iOS (and Android/desktop) but they barely exist if at all.
Unless some (unknown to me and possibly everyone) change happens and PWAs explode in popularity… there’s going to have to be a reckoning that end users just don’t seem to care/want them.
They can still be useful but the dream of abandoning the app stores (due to PWAs) just doesn’t feel realistic to me.
This phrase is far more prescient than most people think. Yes, it's a numeric minority. However, they have a near-monopoly on _profitable_ users. 13% of the global market and >50% of the profits.
