Hmm. What about Flutter-built apps? Do they fall into the same category? I have a feeling they don’t.

Without trying to defend any side, I think there are a few more causes to this whole situation:

• some developers just refuse learning anything else than JavaScript, because it’s a very capable language, technically runs everywhere and they have a lot of experience with it.
• a lot of companies don’t have the luxury to develop a native apps, because of financial or time-constraints. Developing native apps is quite expensive and triples if not quadruples the investment.
• a lot of companies simply want to port an app to native so that the user doesn’t have to fiddle with the browser.

If you ask me, they’re all legitimate reasons, however, in an ecosystem such as Apple, having poor control over what an apps does and how it works, can in fact contribute to the a degraded perception of that ecosystem, which obviously they don’t want.

Another aspect that’s not mentioned in the article is accessibility. Unfortunately very few web developers create WCAG 2.1 AA compliant applications, which means Apple, who are otherwise very accessibility conscious, end up with non-accessible applications in their ecosystem. Had the app been built as a native application, the accessibility part would have been much more baked into the development by default. This is of course a developer issue, and could be solved with web developers actually caring about disabled folks for a change.