True, but it's much easier for web apps to alter the deal than native apps, given most of their local state is ephemeral and hard to access, and much of the useful data, and potentially even software, is on the server. How many emulators are there for web apps, compared with emulators for nearly every popular OS/platform in the last 40 years?
We're talking about mobile apps here, that's where the web is losing.
They're already almost all subscription-only. They break after a few OS releases unless they're updated (true for both iOS and Android). Local state is "hard to access"? Check. (though it's easier on Android, for now) They "alter the deal" all the time, and there's nothing you can do about it.
And native apps will always exist for any appropriate use cases, but tons of the "apps" people use on mobile are nothing but websites that you can't use adblock on (DNS excepted). Many don't have true local content, just caching.
It is just as easy with native apps distributed via app stores, which is why most companies aren't that bothered with gatekeeping, as folks in sites like HN.
Emulators for Web apps doesn't make sense, that is a browser.
It naturally depends on the app (e.g. an app that simply calls out to an API naturally has the same issues whether it is native or not), but native apps tend to work offline, and you have the binary in a somewhat self-contained form, so you can (with the level of effort varying on platform, and the state of the available emulators) run the app with your data on a different machine/system.
For local-first web apps, which would be the easiest web apps to do this with, you have to fight the browser to do this, and I'm not sure how you would be able to dump out the state and code of a web app on Android Chrome and load it in Desktop Firefox. That and being able to update/modify the app locally permanently (and maybe even control updates) would I think make the equivalent of a web app emulator.
