> Well, if you haven’t been paying attention, the FTC hasn’t exactly been batting 1000 when it came to their lawsuits against BigTech…

Meh, they've been doing decent. The current admin is pushing antitrust in a way that we haven't seen since the early days of the Internet, and I'm excited to see where it goes. The last time the US pushed antitrust this hard we ended up with one of the biggest booms of innovation in the history of the Internet.

> So the App Store doesn’t provide value except for having features that app developers need that provide value?

By this definition, literally every single monopoly "provides value". Seriously, what's going on here? You're bouncing all over the place. You go from, "Apps can launch PWAs and they just don't because they need easy monetization, and the fact that the App Store provides easy access to predatory monetization schemes is somehow something to be lauded", to "okay, apps can't launch PWAs and that's even more proof that the app store provides value, because restricting APIs to a specific storefront is a value proposition somehow". This is nonsensical.

At least now it sounds like we're both finally agreeing that in-app purchases through an Apple ID are not the only reason why PWAs aren't more popular, and there are actually limitations at play here?

But also, no, Google and Apple both holding back the web as an app platform is not the same thing as providing value to developers. This is getting silly. If I construct a dam in front of the local river, drain the aquifers, and then starve everyone of water and start selling bottled water for $10 a pop, that doesn't make me an innovator, it makes me a parasite. Which is, again, what everyone has been saying about the companies involved (both Apple and Google, I need to apparently specify that since you have trouble believing that 2 companies can be bad at the same time). When Google and Apple hold back capabilities from the web in order to force developers into unwanted contracts, that is predatory behavior.

You started this out by asking why devs don't launch PWAs and positing it was because the app store provided an easy monetization model that was worth 30%. In actuality, the reason is because PWAs can't be used for serious app development regardless of how they monetize. Apple could port the App Store's IAP system fully to the web, and these developers still wouldn't be able to use PWAs. Apple has claimed that they can; Apple has repeatedly made the claim that PWAs are a viable alternative to the app store. But they're lying. Factually, observably lying. PWAs lack critical capabilities that are available to native applications, which makes them a non-serious alternative to the app store.

Coincidentally, these are capabilities that Apple and Google are able to hold back because of their collective dominance over the browser space and their use of (in Google's case) default browser placement and anticompetitive promotion which makes Chrome the defacto standard of what is and isn't supported, as well as direct interference with web standards (see Notifications), and in Apple's case by outright blocking capabilities from the iPhone that would neither harm security or privacy (app badges, reliable offline storage, etc...).

Which is what everyone has said a dozen times already, and you keep dancing around the point even though you've so far come up with zero arguments against it except to confidently assert over and over that it's all fine.

This is a difficult point to get across because you don't seem to have a really concrete idea of what anticompetitive behavior is. Apparently forced bundling, price fixing, vertical integration, etc... don't count in your eyes as anticompetitive behavior. Thankfully, both the FTC and Europe disagree, the current administration has been historically good about antitrust (although there's obviously still a long way to go). And hopefully, the courts will agree as well. Certainly Europe does not appear to be buying the arguments that Apple pushed in American courts, and even in American courts, the renewed interest in going after Google might lead to followup scrutiny of Apple's very similar positions that were dismissed before.

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But none of this changes anything about your claims:

> But they want access not only to Apple’s customers but also to in app purchases so they can use every psychological trick to take advantage of the whales.

No, the situation is more complex. It's not only Apple's payment methods that keep people in the store.

> Okay, developers can choose on Android.

No, they can't. Android has many of the same PWA limitations that iOS does, and Google has gone out of its way to make it hard to access alternative stores and to punish distributors who load alternative stores. This is part of the lawsuit against them. "But what about Google" is not a convincing argument in favor of Apple's behavior.

> Local storage is not the answer.

Yes, it is part of the answer, consumers expect reliable offline storage in addition to cloud syncing, neither of which are available in a reliable way for PWAs. It's kind of my mistake for allowing you to focus in on local storage so much as well, since the reality is that both local storage and synchronization are borked for PWAs on iOS.

So you're wrong that local storage doesn't matter, but also PWA storage would still be broken anyway even if we were only talking about online storage.

> Because for the majority of users - they don’t need a separate account because all of their state can either be saved by the app just saving locally and letting iCloud take care of it.

No, they can't, not with PWAs.

You keep repeating the same things over and over again, and they're just not true. And you can keep looping through them and coming up with new ways to push the same ideas (apparently now Apple and Google holding back the web is evidence for the App Store as a competitive platform? Sure, whatever, that's very convincing /s), but it doesn't change anything about the provably incorrect things you've said to get to this point.