We recently spoke with RedMonk senior analyst Kate Holterhoff about a question that has shaped the mobile ecosystem for over a decade: why has the open web struggled to compete with native apps on mobile, and what can regulators do to restore competition?

You can listen to and read the full conversation on RedMonk.

We discuss how and why OWA formed:

Talk to me about the history. When was the OWA founded? Kate Holterhoff

So we started in early 2021 and we’d been waiting for features from Apple for about 10 years. The main ones being install prompts for web apps and notifications, which we identified as the biggest blockers for web apps taking off. And we tried very hard to get Apple to do it. So we were messaging their top engineers. We were petitioning them. We were posting on WWDC saying we need these features. We can’t produce apps without them. Safaris got lots of bugs, please, can you get a bigger budget from your VPs? And we ended up, we kept pushing for that and then we just got no, we had made no progress. It basically got stonewalled in terms of features and functionality.

And then eventually we’re like, this isn’t working, we better form a group and then we did with a bunch of random engineers and we got together and we started talking to regulators basically to say look there’s this amazing potential for basically the entire app market and it’s being squeezed out by the gatekeepers. Could you look at intervening? And we started with the UK’s competitions and markets authority. And yeah, we started having meetings with them and then it kind of just snowballed from there. Alex Moore

Why web apps are a threat to Apple:

The threat of web apps for them is enormous because what it means is that web apps are equal on all devices. And so if you build a web app, it’s going to work equally on Android, I mean, without these blockers it’s going to work equally on Android as well as iOS. And then that loses their competitive advantage. In addition, there’s no App Store fees. I think it’s around $24 billion a year in App Store fees at the moment. But obviously, if it was going via the web. They don’t collect any of that revenue. The other thing it would also allow, it would allow for other competitors. So if you think about other mobile phone ecosystems, there’s pretty much iOS and Android.

It’s not really possible for a third or a fourth or a fifth competitor to come into the market because you need that entire ecosystem set up. If web apps had been allowed to succeed and were the predominant form of apps, anybody could create a mobile device because then you’d have access to the library of apps that you need to be successful. And I’d argue that one of the reasons, say, Windows Phone didn’t take off was because they didn’t have the library of apps. And it was too much of an uphill battle to try and sell each of the developers. You got your iOS app, you got your Android app. Can you now build a Windows app as well? Alex Moore

And why web apps could replace native apps:

And I just want to respond to what I hear often when I speak to developers who really are cynical about the eventual success of web apps. And they just say that native apps work better. And they sort of dismiss the PWAs as just not being realistic as much as they maybe ideologically agree with all the points that you’re making here. What is your response to folks who are skeptical of PWAs being able to function at the level of native apps? Kate Holterhoff

So the way I like to think about it is, at the end of the day, what you’re talking about in terms of the difference between native apps and web apps is, do you really think that web apps do not have the capability of painting to the screen 60 frames a second and doing the kinds of interactions that native apps can do? [...] So a great example is Photoshop. They ported the entirety of desktop Photoshop into a web browser. [...] If you can build a software as complicated as Photoshop in the web, then all of the other software, which is arguably significantly more simple, is also possible. [...] All the features and functionalities that we’re missing from native. Most of them are artificial. They’re just Apple’s, they’ve refused to provide an easy installation process and there’s no competition. So there’s nothing pushing them to invest significantly so that the lowest common denominator across the browsers is at a higher level. Alex Moore

To learn more listen to the full talk. We also recommend listening to this conversation between Kate Holterhoff and Alex Russell on PWAs, App Stores, and Mobile Performance.