It really reeks of the same kind of anticompetitive behavior that got MS in trouble twenty years ago.

Apple is way worse in this regard, but Google is still incentivized to keep at least PWAs from being first class citizens on Android because they don't get their app store sales cuts or microtransaction money from them. And at least on Android you can install other browsers.

People consider the hegemony of Chrome to be the premier threat to the open web but I keep feeling iOS Safari is the real drag. Apple is so heavily incentivized to sabotage web tech that could encroach on their app store revenue.

I wonder if there is anything like a PWA store?

Win10 store allows PWAs, and even automatically lists the ones it finds online (via Bing crawler).

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/pwa

I find it all oddly ironic. Remember back in late 90s - early 00s, Microsoft was generally hostile towards open web and the (then only just appearing) web apps, because that undermined its desktop app monopoly? Here we are 20 years later, and now it's Apple and Google protecting their turf on mobile, while Microsoft is promoting PWAs to entice the mobile devs into supporting Win10.

They do it on ChromeOS though, so I guess it is politics as usual.

You can use browsers other than Safari on iOS.

All browsers on iOS are essentially wrappers for Safari. They all have to use the built-in iOS WebView; per Apple's rules you're not allowed to execute JS or anything like that on your own.

Which means no extensions for iOS Firefox nor Chrome.

I can’t install any adblockers on my iPhone, the best is Safari which has some built in anti-tracking but that’s it.