Isn't that already the case, only with a thin wrapper to handle notifications?

I've seen many apps on iOS that just feel… weird. Especially the scroll. It's my understanding that many such apps are just web views.

Are you referring to web apps where scroll is hijacked by JS in some way? Because I don’t see how you can get more native than the default browser’s default scroll implementation.

The browsers default scroll implementation never feels like scrolling in native apps.

Even Safari? It's about as native as you can get. I've seen no evidence it uses different scroll logic than whatever "native" app. In fact many "native" apps that reinvented the wheel in their GUI framework have a decidedly worse scroll than many web apps.

I swear there was an article on the WebKit blog that detailed how the scrolling was different, but am not able to find it now.

Exactly. And if I have alternatives that are native, I use those or mostly just do without.

Anyone doing non-native apps on my phone will almost[0] never get money from me.

[0] There has to be the occasional exception, I suppose.

Yes, because they will have a harder time tracking you and taking control over your phone and its data.

Also web apps are not censored by the app store guidelines.

Are you seriously arguing that the web does a better job of respecting user privacy than desktop and mobile operating systems?

Yes. Mobile and desktop apps have much more data leakage because they can store more data for longer and have much more APIs to use. A mobile app provides 100x more detailed data with more persistence than a website ever could.

This is well understood by the adtech industry and is why so many websites push apps in the first place.

Historically I think you are right but I'm not so sure it's still the case.

Do you think an iPhone with the tracking blocker engaged is still a richer source of data than the web app on an iPhone? Facebook claims that Apple's privacy protections cost them $10 billion of revenue the first year.

Yes. Apple's changes have reduced tracking in both modalities but webapps are far more constricted by Safari than native apps.

Yes that is what he's saying. It's also the truth and the only reason every social media forced you to use the app.

No, that's not why. It's because it's hard to make a performant Facebook webapp with all the bells and whistles.

Yes.

When i close the webpage, that page is gone. It's not running in the background silently collecting data. With a properly configured browser (a few extensions, no third party cookies, or even separate containers), it doesn't have much data to gather in the first place.

> Also web apps are not censored by the app store guidelines.

Neither is any of the apps on custom F-Droid repos.