The web can be a competitor for the app stores, breaking that monopoly. It already did on desktop (where most users spend > 90% of their time in a browser)
And yes, you can write native apps in a lot of languages, but you can't choose how/where you distribute.
Except one of the main things i like about the web is that websites don’t have invasive access to my life. The web-as-app-platform idea erodes that.
But either way the issue is the same - apple preventing us from installing what we want. But my solution protects freedom in a more robust way: if you break the app store monopoly, you can install chrome or firefox and do all the web-app-platform nonsense you want. If safari adds all the features on that list you’re still stuck demanding apple add a new feature every time you want to innovate.
And as for programming - for the web you can write in a lot of languages but you only have two options For debugging - js and webassembly.
> if you break the app store monopoly, you can install chrome or firefox and do all the web-app-platform nonsense you want
Apple would also need to be forced to provide the APIs that browsers need so they can properly integrate with the OS (a lot of those APIs are private, currently), but good point, that would absolutely be one way to break this open.
“Private api” is fairly meaningless outside of an app store context. The symbols are easily extracted and headers can be re-constructed in minutes. The issue has always been that if you use these apis your app will be rejected from the store.
And yes, you can write native apps in a lot of languages, but you can't choose how/where you distribute.
On the web, you can. It's built that way.