Personally, a part of the reason I pay premium for Apple's devices is that I want a platform that is locked down, and one company that makes sure that all the others adhere to certain privacy and security standards.
Except Apple already made that move with QRCode App within their App Store. Further destroying PWA chances of succeeding.
PWAs don't work on iOS because of Web Push being spammy, and there are easy solutions to that problem (namely, not allowing Web Push until the app is added to the Home Screen), but Apple doesn't think that is enough.
Yes I agree Web Push is certainly a solvable problem. I have always maintain vast majority of Apps doesn't need to be a native app, some sort of decent Web Front End with sprinkle of Native functionality will do. Like most Web Forum, Stores' Front End etc. These business's App doesn't need Apple's curation and gatekeeping.
Right now you can choose an open platform, where Google, Facebook and Epic do what they want, or a closed platform that forces them to play by certain rules regarding privacy and whatnot.
The moment you allow direct installs of the apps, all the big players will remove themselves from the store and prepare a versions with looser privacy standards (FB & Google), or ones that show you popups for other stuff and use processing power in the background (Epic).
Yeah, also war is peace and ignorance is strength.
People should be allowed to make “bad” decisions, if they can’t it’s not really freedom.
Anyway, you're presuming that people would have a choice
The only reason Facebook and Google are going to have to get permission to not track you on iOS is the App Store. If they could circumvent the App Store you bet they would and the first thing to go would be those pesky privacy protections.
I don't want to give my CC info to a half dozen different companies with worse data security records than Apple, but suddenly every app will require me to install another "App Store", so suddenly my choices become "share my info with dozens of companies that can sell it" vs "don't install any software"
That's such a great choice you've given me.
No, deliberately saying the opposite of reality does not make it so. More freedom will result in people being able to enjoy more freedom.
Giving more freedon to monopolists like Google or Facebook will result in less freedom to people that have to rely on those monopolies.
Fortunately, Apple cares about its users and won’t enable a feature that is only abused for spam.
“a feature that is only abused for spam” is a wild misreading of PWAs. It’s true that they aren’t used too widely today but that’s _because_ Apple refuses to support it. I think it was a huge strategic misfire to create this PWA “brand” as it allows everyone to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The vast majority of the APIs involved make sense.
What websites are you visiting?
Sometimes you just have project managers or clients who want it like that regardless of how awful it is. In that scenario I think it's the developer's responsibility to give push back. It's why I don't get asked about implementing pop-ups on homepages.
So just don't click 'Allow'. Why should the manufacturer have to intervene here?
A feature that's primary use case is spam, is a user hostile feature that has no business being in a browser.