"A cynical interpretation is that Apple is deliberately dragging their feet because PWAs undermine their $99/year + 30% app price + 30% in-app purchases business."
That interpretation doesn't make sense. The $99/year/active developer is a nominal amount -- sofa change to Apple -- that couldn't sanely affect the Safari development roadmap. The 30% is a much a larger amount (though still small to Apple's scale), but PWAs don't compete for that money; a PWA developer looking to monetize their app doesn't have an alternative monetization platform/store with anything like the reach into the iOS device market. Put another way: a PWA developer looking to monetize their app is surely going to release it through the Apple app store anyway.
I agree that the $99/year/developer isn’t that much for Apple. The 30% of all sales is probably significant though - the App Store has a lot of users.
I don’t necessarily agree that PWA developers have no way of monetising their apps though - if I’m not mistaken they could use ads and subscriptions for their services. These would normally grant a cut to Apple if they were done through the App Store, hence the incentive for apple to delay the implementation of PWAs.
> The 30% of all sales is probably significant though
I realized they just announced something on this yesterday, which I found transcribed[1]:
"We're happy to announce that this week, we're going to achieve another huge milestone. The money that developers have earned through the App Store will top $100 billion."
So if that's the developer's %70 to Apple's 30%, then Apple's share is $43 billion. That's a lot, but over just about 10 years. I don't know how much was, e.g., in the last year, but Apple's revenue is over $200 billion/year, I think, so in terms of percent, it's in the low single-digits.
> I don’t necessarily agree that PWA developers have no way of monetising their apps though.
I didn't say they have no way of monetizing, just nothing with the reach comparable to the Apple app store. Outside the app store, a PWA developer can charge, e.g., subscriptions. But (1) it's not free (they'll have to create or buy a mechanism for doing so... there are transaction fees too, but much less than 30%); and (2) would entirely lack the discoverability of Apple's app store. Sure, it's perhaps possible that a completing PWA app marketplace could be created and marketed, but it doesn't exist now, and it would take a lot of time and a lot of money.
I didn't think Apple generally took a piece of ad revenue from iOS apps. Wasn't it just their own iAd network that took a piece? (Also, I thought that was killed off).
$99/year isn't small. There are 2m apps in the iOS App Store today. Each app must pay $99/year. That's $198m/year as a passive income stream for Apple.
Factor in 30% of app purchase price, plus 30% of in-app purchases, and you have a significant revenue stream.
This assumes (incorrectly) that every app is released by a different developer with their own account. In reality many of those 2M apps are basically shovelware - with developers releasing dozens if not hundreds of different apps under the same account.
>> The $99/year/active developer is a nominal amount
Is it really?
There are 2 million apps in the iOS App Store[0]. At $99/year to be listed in the store, that's $198,000,000/year for Apple.
On top of that, you have 30% price of an app. 12% of those apps are paid[1], that's 240,000 paid apps. Suppose the average price of a paid app is $5, and suppose each app is purchased 2000 times. (I have no idea what the average is, but this sounds reasonable.) 240,000 apps * $5 * 2000 purchases * Apple's 30% cut = $720,000,000 revenue for Apple.
Then we have to add 30% in-app purchases. This is a bigger number than app purchases, both free and paid apps have in-app purchases. This article[2] says in-app purchases make up half of all mobile revenue - that would put in-app purchases reaping Apple $918,000,000/year for their 30% cut.
These are educated guesses based on some napkin math, but I'm betting Apple's iOS App Store business is bringing in figures in the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars every year. Either way, it's not nominal.
We don't have to guess: Apple reports these numbers. They earned $11.5 billion in revenue from the app store in 2017.
I'm not sure what you're expecting here. Apple clearly views their role as protecting users from the hostile aspects of the web: see content blockers, reader mode, anti-tracking features in iOS 12.
Of course Apple is not going to jump on unrestricted JS background execution, unreviewable OTA-updatable tracking, etc. And of course Apple is going to focus their efforts on their native APIs.
Wow, even larger than my napkin calculations. So my assertion that the app store business is significant is correct.
The problem with Apple, or any other big corporation, "protecting" users is that censorship is a two-edged sword. It's great that the iOS App Store doesn't suffer from, say, malware. It's not great that Apple has the final say over published content; Apple (or hostile governments forcing Apple) can block content for any reason; political, religious, or even vindictive. This is not merely theoretical[0].
The "censorship" angle doesn't really fly. Apple doesn't censor any web content: all websites are accessible via iOS. The App Store is a different matter. Yes, Apple blocks the boobs and the baby-shaking games, like Amazon blocked the "Keep Calm and Rape" t-shirts. That's not censorship, that's a storefront owner exercising common sense in the products they choose to stock.
Apple is in good company in limiting what can be installed. Chrome on iOS is hobbled, but Firefox on ChromeOS isn't even a thing, and Google Chromecast is even more locked down.
Ultimately it comes down to this: Apple is not a monopoly but a minority player, and iOS users have made a conscious decision because of the value they've found in Apple's ecosystem. If you want access to that market, you have to make your products appeal to that userbase.
That interpretation doesn't make sense. The $99/year/active developer is a nominal amount -- sofa change to Apple -- that couldn't sanely affect the Safari development roadmap. The 30% is a much a larger amount (though still small to Apple's scale), but PWAs don't compete for that money; a PWA developer looking to monetize their app doesn't have an alternative monetization platform/store with anything like the reach into the iOS device market. Put another way: a PWA developer looking to monetize their app is surely going to release it through the Apple app store anyway.