I keep seeing this conspiracy. It came out during the epic trial that the vast majority of revenue from the App Store comes from pay to win games. Apple isn’t making money off of apps that could be a web apps.
The vast majority of apps you see on the App Store, including most games can be web apps. So I'm not sure what your point is?
Apple has deliberately under-invested in implementing web platform features on Safari. If you've tried to build a web app on Safari vs Android Chrome, you'll know what I mean. It's not a conspiracy - it's a clear as day policy to keep consumers and developers locked into their platform.
That’s really just more evidence to support the theory and is in no way exculpatory.
The only thing it adds to the picture is that the majority of their revenue is also extremely predatory and the underlying model essentially works the same way as slot machines.
What should they do? Ban pay for win games? They already offer Apple Arcade that doesn’t have any of the predatory practices. They can’t be making that much charging $4.95 and paying game developers an advance.
It’s an awful business model. It’s one thing to have Safari hobbled because of high quality business apps and games, another for loot boxes, gems and countdown timers to exploit whales.
The main advantage of the web is interoperability, if you don’t have that and the game engines developers just go for native.
Once the core gaming APIs are supported across both iOS and Android (WebGPU, SIMD, WASM threads, fast storage, install prompts, notifications), I think you will see the main gaming engines implemented and then you’ll see the games move.
The game studios like in app purchasing where you get to buy loot boxes and other zero marginal cost goods without thinking about it.
We have a control in the experiment - we have an “open ecosystem” in Android and supposedly a much better browser - yet and still, game developers still choose to give Google the same 30% cut as Apple. Maybe it’s not because Apple is holding the web back?
Apple has deliberately under-invested in implementing web platform features on Safari. If you've tried to build a web app on Safari vs Android Chrome, you'll know what I mean. It's not a conspiracy - it's a clear as day policy to keep consumers and developers locked into their platform.