This is fantastic. Native web technology is often undersold and overlooked. But it’s there. It’s powerful. And it unlocks the potential to re-open the web and move away from walled gardens.
There's a big conflict of interest between the walled garden and supporting a good PWA experience on iOS. As a result, you have buggy, limited and brittle Web APIs instead of native device APIs.
Users also don't really understand PWAs, they're used to getting things from the App store. The installation routine is cumbersome. Storing local data reliably is not possible.
So you ship a "native" App with a web view, but if you follow the terms of the App store guidelines to the letter, you can not update the app bundle through the web, and you can not use native APIs. It's the worst of both worlds.
It might be an acceptable compromise, but if you want to give your users the best experience, it's not a viable path and likely never will be.
If we had Congressional representatives that understood everything you just wrote, we'd get some serious reforms for this practice. I'm very much against the entire practice, but the way Apple intentionally limits what web APIs they support (especially when they support certain ones on macOS) is criminal.
The irony of Apple's current position on the web is that their big HTML5 Showcase page (back in 2010) literally said, "Standards aren't add-ons to the web. They are the web."
Their current position is completely indefensible when viewed without rose-gold colored glasses.
