Apple declined to implement 16 Web APIs in Safari due to privacy concerns

Google's developer relations team have done a good job convincing web devs that those APIs are pushed by Google to enable "Amazing PWAs", yet we haven't seen them used by any major app. People are choosing to download native apps for more sophisticated applications.

However Google is pushing those APIs because they know tracking people without cookies in future is a big challenge for them and they need new ways of tracking people.

So sad that Google has taken over the web. From the most used browser (Chrome) to the content hijacking (AMP) to the standards (PWA). All to sell you to advertisers.

You have to build these APIs before people use them, and a lot of what Google has been building into Chrome is stuff native apps can do, so the use-case is clearly there.

IMO native apps are capable of far more invasive privacy violations than the web is. But for some reason they're given a very free pass by comparison.

Well, because native apps are intended to be trusted. They do not have a motivation to invade your privacy: proprietary apps are usually paid upfront and risk their future clients, open source can be inspected.

Instead, the overwhelming web business model is "free to use" (akin to f2p in games). That means ads and other monetization side channels become the priority of the app, not the app itself.

And that is for trusted web apps. Let's not even talk about the fact that you are executing random code every time you visit any webpage. That just does not happen with native apps.

That's not true at all! Free native apps abound. Web apps tied to subscriptions are also plentiful.

Open source is neither here nor there: both web sites and native apps can be open source. In fact, the web is unique in allowing you to actually inspect the source that is running on your machine, you have no way of verifying that the code in an open source repo is what actually runs inside your iOS app.