PWAs are awesome, but we don’t see it as either or. If your app needs access to proprietary native SDKs then you need a native app. Capacitor gives you optionality to do both with the same code.
I think that's a fair point. I had a more detailed look at your proposed deliverables, and it all looks pretty cool. Wish you all the best with the launch :)
Instead of this madness device manufacturers could work together with HTML5 cons... to make a set of APIs that access native things, and for not-so-standardized features they could use prefixes kinda like we did in CSS. The websites accessing these HTML5 APIs would simply check for their existence first, then start using them. Usage of the APIs would then kick of device specific permission prompts, etc... Think about the integrations too, we would no longer have to set up application forwarding URLs like twitter:// to route to our app, everything would work from any device!
Even if manufacturers don't work together, if they at least provided JS API access built into their native browsers - then we can build shims on top of them.
I don't think we need manufacturers to cooperate as much as we need the major browser developers to cooperate! Prefixes are not great either - it sets you up for incompatibilities later on. The point is we want collaboration across Google/Apple etc to create one truly cross-platform platform with a standardised API. For all its shortcomings, the browser IS slowly moving towards that goal.