Additionally, unlike modern PWAs, web-apps back then had persistence for data only, so you had to reload the entire application over the network at each launch. People back then loved the switch to native apps because they were extremely snappier.
the whole problem is that apple shipped native apps with tons of skeumorphism and animations, so all js frameworks for webapps spend all their efforts to simulate "slide animation on page change" instead of working on hiding the ajax latency or using local storage better.
and in the end, everyone just saw $$$ in using the closed apps from the store.
Seemed to work well enough on webOS for the Palm Pre.
It's nice that a lot has been implemented, albeit slowly. Though some may still think about Apple incentives.
I.e.: http://nolanlawson.com/2015/06/30/safari-is-the-new-ie/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19586219
https://web.archive.org/web/20100603124720/http://www.forum....
> “The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. And so, you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. And guess what? There’s no SDK that you need! You’ve got everything you need if you know how to write apps using the most modern web standards to write amazing apps for the iPhone today. So developers, we think we’ve got a very sweet story for you. You can begin building your iPhone apps today.” - Steve Jobs/iPhone announcement Jan 2007 at macworld
https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/2019-the-year-of-progr...
What's old, is new again, 12 years later. It's how it always should have been. And guess what? There's no SDK that you need!! ;)