> and justifiable motivation for needing an "app" in the first place

I don't understand this at all. Lack of push notifications is one of the biggest reasons why I still have a number of native apps installed, apps that could be sandboxed webapps otherwise. I have heard push notifications on iOS used as justification for building a native app instead of a webapp so many times. I have talked with users about how there are certain services (Facebook, Twitter, etc...) that I refuse to install on my phone, and their response has been, "well, I'm installing the native app because otherwise I won't get a notification when I'm messaged."

I have a hard time believing that lack of notifications or the barrier entry to building iOS apps has made companies more likely to build websites. My experience has always been the opposite, if I ask a developer why they're building a native app instead of a website, there is a really high chance that push notifications are the reason they give me.

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And there's honestly not a lot of reason for most apps to be native apps at all except that:

A) data storage is unreliable and can get deleted unrecoverably without user prompts.

B) push notifications are unreliable on Android and don't work on iOS.

Email, timers, alarms, every social media site, etc... How many native apps are on your phone -- apps that have much greater access to your hardware and that can fingerprint you with a lot more ease -- that realistically never needed low-level access to your hardware in the first place, and are only native because that's the only way to provide notifications or work reliably without a server?

Honestly, my biggest criticism of push notifications (and part of the reason why I think they're less powerful than people are making them out to be) is that they're server-centric; the push notifications standard has all the fingerprints of Google saying "well, why would anyone ever make a webapp that didn't have a backend?" If there was a reliable way to schedule notifications/alarms offline without ever going through a server at all, and if there was a reliable way to store user information where I didn't have to worry it would magically vanish unless I backed it up to a cloud, I think I would be able to uninstall something like 50% of the apps on my phone and replace them with trivially small Javascript apps. And whenever a company tried to give me some bloated mess, I could run an adblocker on top of it or just deploy my own replacement.

And that would be a really good thing. It's good that (for example) Wordle is a PWA because I can run an adblocker on top of it. Wordle is far better as a PWA than it would be as a native app. Similarly I honestly should not have to install an alarm app on my phone; that does not need direct access to my hardware, it can be a webapp. Except it can't, because there's no way for a user to allow a website to schedule an alarm.

I too want to just use mostly websites instead of native phone apps, and I too don't want my data sent to a bunch of random servers someplace. I don't understand how people think that blocking basic functionality makes companies less likely to require native apps though. The reasoning does not make sense to me; I don't know what I'm missing but the argument seems like it's saying that making something easier will make fewer people do it? I don't understand that logic.

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Edit: Ok, charitably, if the argument is that this will make more of the limited webapps that exist today ask for additional permissions, then yeah, I see that.

But A: most of those companies were trying to get you to install native apps before

B: having those companies hand you a webapp gives you much more control over what they're doing, including doing things like blocking prompts and setting up extensions to block their nag methods, which you can't do natively.

And C: it sounds like Apple is basically duplicating their install permissions for notifications anyway, which I think is a very sensible approach.

It would be good for push notification to be revisited as a standard, because I think it's a kind of terrible standard? But it would be good to revisit notifications in general. And Apple's approach, which explicitly wires push notifications up to obey the same permissions and settings as native apps, seems like a good step in that direction.