I do all my browsing and development in Safari and I find using anything else quite unbearable. From the messy developer tools to the lack of system-wide password manager, the other browsers out there just don't do anything to deserve consideration. I recently did some benchmarks, all on the same device with purported support for the same processor, and the Brave browser cannot run one of my apps at anywhere near a usable speed. Benchmarking it produced scores _half_ that of Safari's (meaning half the speed of Safari). I've spent ages in Chrome trying to get it to simply wrap text when viewing the source code of scripts, which can be a literal pain because Google thinks Dark Mode isn't worth implementing for their developer tools. And I wish this left at least Firefox as an option, but every time I open a Firefox window or tab, it tries to read my machine's environment variables--if denied access to this sensitive information, it becomes unusable and unresponsive. No other browsers do this except those in the Firefox family, such as Tor Browser. Yeah, the privacy browser, as it calls itself.

So now the narrative is that Apple isn't supporting PWAs because they want to make money from the App Store. First, they do support PWA features, because PWAs are not a singular thing, but a list of new ideas for web browser features. Second, installing web pages as apps by adding them to your mobile devices' Home Screen is a chore performed only by developers who are also die-hard Apple luddites. Only European developer-managers have brought up PWAs with me as a serious option and alternative to a native app. I can only try warn them that the general population in the West at least, has no clue what a PWA is and such "apps" will have no visibility on the App Store, amongst many other drawbacks. It just seems like a fantasy held by a niche group of developers with a pet argument against Apple that PWAs will ever gain mindshare or usage with anyone but each other--not the flock of average users they need.

Please tell me I'm wrong about my final point--but part of the PWA "standard" is web workers. I understand these as Javascript files that run perpetually or periodically while the "app" is even closed or minimized. As Apple battles cookies and trackers, these web workers seem to be invisible to the user, so far as I can tell. Background App Refresh is another story, you can disable it or toggle it on a per-app basis. For Apple to support PWAs, they must first apply this same control to web workers, and with every other security setting.

The iPhone was launched as a (proto)-PWA-only device, but developers hacked and pleaded for native app development by third parties, and Apple delivered. They're delivering on PWAs too, even though it's kind of redundant (I make cross-platform apps for web and mobile/native easily).

Even as Apple lowers their fees/commission for App Store operation costs, and PWA features are carefully added along side--decades of light-weight competitors desperately spreading FUD and moving goal posts has created a subset of people (gamers mostly but some devs too) who think of Apple the same as people thought of "Reefer Madness" or any other psyop that is less about sound reasoning and engineering and more a battle of attrition.