Your service not having access to my data is a feature. It's one of the primary reasons I prefer websites over apps.

what if the service is a way to manage your data? In my case its a photo library alternative for fitness photos/videos. Take a picture of your handstand every month and store it locally in the app documents folder or on PhotoKit so that you can see improvements over time (nothing is stored in the cloud). I don't know of a way to do that on a mobile website.

I wish you well.

I wont be a customer because I don’t care enough about my looks or fitness to get into daily photos. But, really, what does your app offer over the photo gallery and folders already on my phone?

I personally like keeping it separate from my phone's photos/video folders. You can also add notes/rep counts and add links to useful workouts you find online.

What personal data (that you didn't explicitly provide or allow access to) does an app have access to that a website doesn't?

There's a million things they can do. Permissions aren't that fine-grained, and the apps always have ways to infer a lot of stuff. Heck, they can even make background tasks, while if it's a website I know that if I close the tab your tool is gone.

There's a whole range of things that an app can do/infer on a system that a web page in a browser can't.

Things like processes that are running, RAM, battery life, and more.

I don't know about iOS, but the file picker on Android is fine. Live streaming through Javascript is also no harder than live streaming through native libraries. Granted, there may be less "official" SDKs out there because the web is an open ecosystem, but still.

Jitsi and Kickstarter have quite competent streaming systems. I remember being amazed by the incredibly low latency the Kickstarter streaming system has (always sub 100ms between camera and my screen across the Atlantic with good quality!).

An app for uploading images and videos, writing text posts, receiving payment and streaming video doesn't need a native app. If there is a choice between giving an absurd percentage to Apple or building a web version, the web version makes a lot more sense.

However, even if they build out a web version right now, Apple will refuse any update pointing users towards the web version of any app because that goes against their TOS. That will make any switch quite difficult.

Even if technically all SDKs had an equivalent, a PWA never, ever feels like a real native app. All the difference is noticable. It's all the slight details, gesture and touch handling, and few more, but they all sum of and it feels laggy.