[colinmorelli]

> Any stories of startups that had a running website already and then boosted their usage by an order of magnitude by adding apps for the various appstores?

I'm not sure why an order of magnitude should be the effect we're chasing. Doubling would be phenomenal, even a 10% lift could be massive depending on your current size. The only threshold you need to hit is that the value gained from building the apps exceeds the cost to build them. Certainly that can happen at much less than 10x growth.

With that said, the problem is that this is an infeasible proposition for businesses. Ignoring any specific tasks that are actually just better when run native, many users of high-touch apps (used at least once per week, for example) get real value from having a native experience. If your competitors have it and you don't, you'll likely lose users because of it. Asking Facebook to drop the Instagram app because we want to stick it to Apple is only going to help Snap.

In theory, there is potentially some future hope for WebAssembly and PWAs, but if/when they get to the point where they can truly replicate a native experience, I see no reason why Apple wouldn't restrict them the same way that they do native apps. That is, unless a court rules against it or legislation changes.