People have been making this tired argument for literally over a decade.
Mobile web apps failed because they are inherently worse in every single way than native apps. There will never be some magical feature e.g push notifications or installation on Home Screen that will change this. Apple even was going to use web apps instead of native until they too realised how bad they are.
So no there is no conspiracy by Apple to prevent the rise of web apps.
I think it’s possible to develop a reasonably good web app or PWA. I’ve seen a small handful, but the vast majority I encounter don’t meet that bar. Truly great web apps are rare.
There’s so many little things that need to be gotten right for a mobile app of any kind to feel good to use, and on the web it’s all entirely up to the developer since it’s “bring your own everything” with no shared known-good foundation and scaffolding to rely on (even React doesn’t really fit with the wildly different ways it can be used). There’s so many variables at play that the average incidence of papercuts is markedly higher.
The other thing is that to make a great web app, the developer needs to care a lot about delivering quality and polish, which is somewhat rare. This can probably be attributed to the web as a platform often being chosen to keep costs down (multiplatform, large pool of devs) — while in theory the savings from not having to maintain codebases for separate platforms could instead be invested in quality of the web app, it’s usually not, instead being put towards more marketable things as the app is forever stuck at “technically works” in all its janky glory.
And yet a lot of us avoid the Reddit app and use the mobile web version instead. Lots of apps are just thin web wrappers too, and I bet most users don't even notice.
It's all about the $$$. Apple is no different than Google in that regard :)
- Apple: Asking premium price and reducing alternatives
- Google: Free for the end-user, get money from other means if possible ( eg. ads)