And all Apple users will claim it to be the best thing since sliced bread: "it's amazing - you don't need to install anything - just go on the website and the app is ready to go, while being perfectly sandboxed within the confines of your browser".
Then they allowed third party apps on their app store and realized how easily they could be monitized... Just watch the original announcements for the iphone and the jobs interviews from that time period.
Yeah, I'm aware - wrote an article about this very thing a few years ago. But they also u-turned pretty spectacularly and halted the progress of PWAs for a long time, and still continue to do so. Their supporters claim security/privacy is the main reason, but to me it's fairly clear that they're just protecting their app store revenue.
Kind of close. Here was the relevant portion of the actual iPhone announcement by Steve Jobs saying all you needed to write great native apps for iPhone was ajax and web 2.0. There was no mention of "app store" in the speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1nwLilQy64