⚠ The Web-App End-RunModerate threat

The App Store toll assumes developers must come through Apple's gate to reach iPhone users; the danger is a growing set of ways to reach those users without passing through it at all. Progressive web apps — full-featured software that runs inside the browser — keep improving, and the same regulators pressing on the App Store are also forcing Apple to let¹ rival browser engines onto the iPhone, which could one day make the web a genuine delivery channel that Apple neither controls nor taxes. Cloud gaming does something similar for games, streaming the play from a distant server² so the heavy app never lives on the device or in the store.

The danger is that the toll is only as valuable as the gate is unavoidable. The toll is also narrower than it looks: of $1.4 trillion of billings and sales the App Store ecosystem facilitated in 2025, developers paid no commission on over 90%, and digital goods and services were $149 billion³. If whole categories of software — games, media, productivity — can be delivered adequately through a browser or a stream, then developers gain leverage they never had, and the most demanding, highest-grossing apps are exactly the ones with the resources and the motive to build the end-run around Apple's commission.

Native apps are the answer for now: they still offer performance, integration, and an experience the web cannot yet match, and that it controls enough of the on-device plumbing to keep the native path clearly superior for now. Most users prefer the frictionless tap of an installed app to a bookmark, and Apple has been slow — some would say deliberately — to let browser capability and cloud gaming flourish on iOS.

Slow-building, and moderate for now. The end-run is technically real and improving, and regulation is helping it along, but the native experience retains genuine advantages and Apple holds many levers to keep its own gate the path of least resistance. The threat grows only if the web closes the quality gap faster than Apple can widen it.