No. There were no ads, no invasive tracking, no obnoxious pushes to move people to native – we didn’t care which platform people used. People just genuinely prefer native apps to PWAs. This should not be a controversial statement.

If you say that people prefer native desktop apps to web apps, you’ll get a lot of agreement – people complaining about Electron, Slack using up all their RAM, etc.

If you say that people prefer native mobile apps to web apps – a setting where the advantage of native is even more pronounced – then all of a sudden you get a bunch of people who simply refuse to believe that this is true.

I’ve noticed a lot of overlap between the people who reject this and people who dislike the App Store for other reasons (e.g. locked down devices). I think the difference between accepting people prefer native on desktop vs mobile is not primarily driven by facts but by ideology. People who dislike App Stores are inclined to prefer PWAs and they prefer to believe everybody is like them despite it being pretty obvious this is not actually true.