Interestingly, Steve Jobs's vision for apps on iOS was essentially PWAs. He was forced to back down after developer found their way around these restrictions (i.e. jailbroke) and realized they could write much higher quality, faster, and more efficient apps natively.
Your argument doesn't really make sense: GUIs made a lot of software accessible to the average user, while web apps does nothing of the sort. To the end user, there are almost no benefits to using a web app; they're slower (yes, computers have gotten faster. That doesn't mean that the gap between web apps and native ones doesn't exist), they less accessible, they look worse, and they can't do half the things because they need to run in a web browser. The only benefits are for the developer since they don't have to spend time figuring out how to write native code for a handful of platforms and can now just write software for the lowest common denominator.
The success of the GUI shows why computing is not driven by concerns over efficiency. PWAs being less efficient than native apps is completely irrelevant. What matters is functionality.
Most apps do nothing that requires being native at all. The fact that PWAs have been implemented badly so far does not mean that there's anything inherently ugly, slow, or less accessible.
Apple could go as far as they want in making PWAs and native apps feel completely identical. They could even go as far as enforcing style, performance, and accessibility rules for PWAs.
The benefit of moving to PWAs are many and the downsides are all solvable.
> Apple could go as far as they want in making PWAs and native apps feel completely identical. They could even go as far as enforcing style, performance, and accessibility rules for PWAs.
But they have gone as far as they want, you should be happy then, or do you mean as far as you want? And isn't one of the points of web apps to not be enforceable by any single entity?
> The benefit of moving to PWAs are many and the downsides are all solvable.
Solvable only with hundreds of millions of dollars of investment and many many years of development. On second thought, they've had all that and are still not even close.
Basically, Steve Jobs didn't want developers spoiling his phone with native apps as they did on Mac OS X. However, it quickly turned out that the native apps could do a whole lot more than the glorified web apps he was proposing, and this quickly led developers to figure out ways to run native code on-device. Apple, seeing the tide turning against it, created the iPhone OS SDK in an attempt to put a modicum of control on the process.
This is the version of history I believe too, but the SDK documentation was so good that people wonder(ed) if they were planning to release it after all, maybe not for the "sell on Apple Store, we get 30% cut" developer market, but for the big software companies.
It's incredible how many people became millionaires because of them, e.g. the makers of Angry Birds. Or makers of apps like Tinder or Uber.
