Following the release of the second beta version of iOS 17.4, it emerged that Apple had restricted the functionality of iOS web apps in the EU. Web apps could no longer launch from the Home Screen in their own top-level window that takes up the entire screen, relegating them to a simple shortcut with an option to open within Safari instead.
The move was heavily criticized by groups like Open Web Advocacy, which started a petition in an effort to persuade Apple to reverse the change, and it even caught the attention of the European Commission. Now, Apple has backtracked and says that Home Screen web apps that use WebKit in the EU will continue to function as expected upon the release of iOS 17.4.
Requiring an app for contacting services like renting a bike or online shopping I find stupid, this should be done on a web page or via standardized protocol.
I think your perspective might be from looking at the current market, when it feels like everything is starting to require a mobile app. But it does not have to be like that. On my laptop I counted 270 installed programs (5000+ packages) and cannot feel any slowdown or any more battery usage. And whole system takes no more than 30GB. It is full of tools, always available for me and easy to update with single command. (I use Arch BTW).
Web is becoming so complicated it is impossible to create a new browser engine. Even if you someone spend billions to create one, there is a high chance many webapps won’t work because standards are not perfect and can be interpreted by current browsers.
Native software is simple. Take Rust program for example, it is compiled to a binary and distributed via your OS. With webapp, there is hack upon hack upon hack to make it working and fit an app into what basically was created as a document format. There is not even a standard way to keep track of licences of the script a website sends to the browser. Today most webapps are just proprietary WebKit apps, with no access to source code and no clear licence, that can be easly changed remotely by the creator but not the user.