[newhouseb]

I'm very curious what these changes are.

Last I looked at PWAs they would get you 95% of the way there for most things, but a number of issues made the use of them as an alternative to native apps untenable (namely the reliable persistence of any data). If Amazon can pull off streaming arbitrary content, full screen with low-latency touch streaming in a way that doesn't feel janky, that'd be a pretty exciting workaround to the App Store regime.

[scarface74]

The reliability of local data controversy was overblown. Local storage only has a 7 day expiry when the page is not saved to the Home Screen.

https://love2dev.com/pwa/ios/

Unused web apps that have not been added to the homescreen will have their cached assets purged after 7 days. This is less of a problem than most think.

Also, iOS devices routinely perform better than Android devices with respect to web rendering and JS performance. Even the cheapest iPhone - the iPhone SE is more performant than any Android.

[fomine3]

iPhone's SoCs are really great but I doubt iOS Safari's WebGL+JavaScript performance outperforms Android's native app.

[scarface74]

The average Android device is not exactly a top of the kind phone on top of that, Java based Android apps aren’t exactly known for performance.

If the top of the line Android phones are slower than the $399 SE, can you imagine how slow the average Android phone is?

But I think this is all a moot point, there shouldn’t be any heavy lifting on the client and all phones have special hardware to handle streaming video.

[fomine3]

Now its Java is relatively fast thanks to ART (AOT) meanwhile Safari need to JIT compile JS (and dynamic lang). Java can also utilize multithreads.

I agree that iPhone SE is steal cheap for chip performance.