But it doesn't have to be, you can simply NOT regulate every damn little thing, especially when there are no victims and you are forbidding a simple trade between two entities who are both willing to engage.
No, developers who want to make money on the Apple Store are not victims. They can develop for Linux and sell apps there if they don't want to pay what Apple wants.
I'm one of them, I'm not supporting Apple or Google and I build everything on the web paying nothing.
I agree, mostly. It is worth noting that until the forced opening of the market occurred, safari was conspicuously lacking in PWA support, especially wasm support. I am a recovering libertarian, and I now see the need for regulation in more places. Largely because of regulatory capture, true, but I don't think anarcho-capitalism works. It just makes lawyers top of the heap instead of warriors (in pure anarchy). Which, when the lawyers command the soldiers, isn't any better.
Because they can collect more data with a native app. A native app is far better from their perspective, but not from the user's, unless it is something computationally bound that can't handle overhead (mostly games?). The last exception is banking apps. They do a lot of weird stuff to fingerprint your phone too, but in this case the user definitely wants them to.
Web apps have ways to track users, but users have ways to mitigate this via adblockers and privacy features in their browser. https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ exists to help users check their own browser fingerprint.
Full apps on the other hand have many more ways to fingerprint users which aren’t as well known, such as “your free storage, your current volume level (to 3 decimal points) and even your battery level (to 15 decimal points)”. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/23/iphone-...)
Is one conclusively better than the other? I’m not sure, but web tracking and fingerprinting is still much more studied and users have more countermeasures, including using a different device where the user has more control.
I think flash and actionscript might be a counterexample? People have different standards too. In thebearly days of win3.1 I liked apps that had different widget sets, now anything that doesn't look native is considered garbage. And some people seem to consider rastered fonts equivalent to baby-eating in a professional context. I don't think I have any common axioms or value systems to carry on conversations with them, but I believe they do care, so it is probably just that PWAs are my preference, but no one elses. I prefer the web mattermost to the app for instance.
Flash is actually an example of how bad cross platform frameworks are compared to native.
Despite what Adobe said when the iPhone first came out, there was no way that Flash was ever going to run on the first generation iPhone. It had only 128MB RAM and 400 MHz processor. When Flash finally came to Mobile in late 2010 on Android, it required 1GB RAM and 1Ghz processor. An iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011.
Heck Safari could barely run on the first iPhone, it would do checkerboards until rendering could catch up with the scrolling.
And if you remember Apple’s cross platform Windows apps - iTunes, QuickTime and the short lived Safari, they also looked very bad on Windows.
Both Google and Facebook at different times said they are moving away from cross platform frameworks and web based technologies for iOS to more native software. Google has all but abandoned their cross platform mobile framework.
And consumers spoke, and now other consumers unhappy with those consumers choices, are demanding the deal be changed.