There are a lot of poor arguments made in the article:

1. WebViews have existed since Windows 98, and they are not meant for embedding third party web content but for rendering first party web content.

There is a lot of web content rendered in WebViews which has not been vetted to run outside of them. There are also frameworks like Cordova which surface native capabilities through extensions. They can do this because portions of the WebView run in-process.

To provide user choice here would both break a significant portion of these apps and would result in third party code being injected into your application. It is simply untenable as a position.

On the other hand, the stores _already_ have policies about apps using WebViews to render third party content. Witness the recent article about FakeSpot being removed from Apple's App Store due to complaints by Amazon. A far more appropriate (if still very aggressive) restriction would be around web views being limited to first party content - content included in the application, or marked as being renderable within a particular application's Web View.

2. More calling out for Apple not being aggressive for PWA technology. In this case, there is a linked list of features that were 2-5 years delayed - but not to any standard release. Thats the delay from when Chromium shipped the feature.

Chrome has a very different perspective on Web technologies from Chrome OS, which sought to have no native applications and to have web technologies be the only way to use the laptop or tablet. While they since have backed off on this approach by allowing for running Android applications, this meant for a long time that lack of a "WebUSB" API would also mean these laptops effectively did not have support for any USB devices beyond what the underlying OS included.

It is also worth noting that when people bash Apple for not shipping technologies like WebMIDI aggressively as Chrome, they also leave off that neither Firefox nor IE shipped the features (until recently, when IE became a chromium vender fork). They also leave off how many of these "Chrome Specials" are not tracked to become standards.

3. Even if Apple deleted the one line about not including a third party web rendering engine in submitted apps, I would imagine substantial additional changes would be needed before a Chrome or Firefox was willing to invest in porting their rendering engine over.

The iOS security environment is based on a sandboxed model with distribution-time grants of static entitlements and user-granted dynamic entitlements. Trying to become the system default browser for something like PWA would involve getting apple to create and grant entirely new entitlements, such as "write and execute arbitrary binary code" (for a Javascript JIT), or "modify home screen" (to install a PWA as an application icon). Even support for the chrome execution model (multiple rendering and background tabs to isolate individual sites) is not fully available on iOS.

Hardly impossible, but it would take a lot of work by all parties. It would also mean that third party browsers look less like a tweak to app review and more like long-term strategic partnerships.