Just don't collect any data. Having an app doesn't mean you need to collect any data.

But you need to develop and maintain 2 apps. And to deal with 2 ugly companies. And even F-Droid if you were an ethically responsible business. So the GP's approach makes sense if you want to run your business in a lightway fashion.

I know it's not exactly the same because these tools are for internal use and never see the public, but react native works well while keeping the maintainence at a minimum. I'm not in on the ops site of device control, but our IT installs the APK packages directly through the enterprise control they have, so we don't have to deal with Apple or Google. So I agree with you completely on that part, but cross platform maintainence isn't as hard as it used to be if your toolsets support it.

I did maintain the Apple account for a previous place where I worked though, and holy hell that sucks. Not so much the day to day work, but being from the Scotish part of Denmark, it hurt my soul to pay them money (it wasn't even mine) to use their platform. Not sure if Google is as shit, never tried their store from the developer side.

Could you elaborate on how they don't deal with the AppStore and the Play Store? I'm new to this.

Sometimes it is not whether or not you do, but if you send the signal that you could.

By refusing to provide a (superfluous) app, not only do you spare yourself the dev (and continued maintenance) costs, you also are not even as exposed to the data protection argument.

I don't have the time to build a native app that will constantly be out of feature parity with the web app.

I also work for a large company and we can't keep all the apps in sync even with thousands of employees. It's just dumb.

Why not create a simple app with a webview so your users are happy? I can't imagine that would take more than a couple hours of work. Google can be burdensome but that's only if you require things like payment and data collection in the app which a webview doesn't need. Otherwise, it's probably less than an hour of work per year to maintain.

iOS app store would reject an app like this, according to their guidelines. At least Google allows you to put PWA as apps in the Play store

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#min...

4.2 Minimum Functionality

Your app should include features, content, and UI that elevate it beyond a repackaged website.

I did, for Android. But can't for iOS, like the other commenter said.

There's a Web app for turning your web app into an Android app. The hardest part is jumping through all the play store hoops.

Are you leaving money on the table or is your business in such a niche that people will jump through hoops for the results?

Both. I'm a one man shop. Not sure how many customers I've lost for not having an iOS app but I'm not positive it'd be a net ROI either. It is niche but not so niche that I don't have a few competitors. If an app is a must have ... It might be better to lose that customer and focus on the parts that set me apart to win others.

Hmm, hard to tell. On the one hand, Pieter Levels with Nomadlist also never bothered with an app.

I have a B2C app that is in a niche, it started as a web app many years ago, but customer expectation is clearly in having an app. It also comes with the benefit of offline-first and local data storage. I wrote the whole thing with Ionic. So one code base for web, Android and iOS.

In my case, not having an app would’ve been a bad decision financially. The app also unlocked external reviews/comparisons of magazines and such. Basically free marketing.

I feel like this is the point of the original post, it is not jumping through hoops to use a website.