> Every platform except the Mac

You make it sound like there are apps for Windows, Linux, and Android, and anything else. There's just an iOS app, and it's there because the WWDC app for iOS has been there for years, especially useful in a physical conference where you're bringing your mobile device with you.

For real computers, a website is just fine. And they probably don't care much about Android anyway.

I should have said every device, not platform.

The website is fine. I'm sure it's fine on iOS, too. But it was supposed to be simple to port iOS apps to MacOS, and they didn't bother with their own developer conference app, if only for the reason to lead by example.

But why even build a native app even if it is easy? It adds no value, and is another thing to test. The web experience is fine for this.

Sure, but the same could be said for iPadOS and iOS which have native clients.

Instead, my question is why are they even featuring a mobile app so prominently at all for a remote conference.

Inertia, most probably. (And it’ll probably be a better, snappier experience than the website on mobile.)

I think Safari natively supports the functionality that the apps provide in-browser.

So why build an app? iOS/iPadOS users have Safari too.

Short answer: iOS Safari isn’t macOS Safari. Not sure if a more recent document like this exists to explain differences between the two.

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn2010...

That document is definitely very out of date, I don’t think any of it is even relevant any more. The unsupported features listed were implemented a long time ago. Safari does handle mouse events (e.g. hover) as best as those concepts translate to a touch platform.

On iPadOS 13 it actually goes as far as pretending to be a Mac. Developers have resorted to using hacky client-side detection such as checking for touch support to determine if they’re on an actual Mac, or an iPad pretending to be a Mac. (https://stackoverflow.com/a/58064750)

Pretty much they don’t want you to treat iPad as a big iPhone, but if they can pull that off with iPad, it implies both iPad and iPhone Safari is a desktop-class browser with almost complete feature parity.

There's no official one, but this one is pretty good: https://wwdc.io

Rambo made an unofficial one:

https://wwdc.io/

Noticed that as well... It’s disappointing.