You can easily use another platform instead of Fanhouse (users can easily go on another website or app).
You can't easily use another delivery method for apps to iPhone users (that would require iPhone users to also buy and carry an Android device, which is a massive hassle).
Telling people that the web is a suitable replacement for native apps is an empty promise, especially when your only option for a browser on iOS is one that is notoriously outdated and incompatible with the modern web.
"notoriously outdated and incompatible with the modern web."
There are a lot of anti-Apple arguments a passionate critic might leverage, but claiming that Safari is "notoriously outdated and incompatible with the modern web" is just foolish. It is laughable nonsense.
Yeah, I saw the "Safari is the new Internet Explorer" argument. I, like many others, found it uproariously stupid. It betrays an authorship and readership that have literally no clue what the IE era was like. Just some sort of "IE bad" cudgel bit of pandering rhetoric.
It is whispering to a very specific audience.
And through all of this, the most remarkable thing is that Safari is hugely over represented among web visitors, both from iOS and Macs. It's almost like providing an extremely fast, light, energy efficient, feature rich browser encourages its use.
Apple added support for iPhone web apps in 2007, including native-style widgets and touch navigation support in mobile Safari. This was enough to support many early games and apps, and Apple even had a curated directory for them.
At the time, developers complained bitterly that Apple didn't provide a native SDK, nor did they support Flash or Java web apps.
In 2021, mobile Safari is good enough to run Amazon Luna game streaming, so you can actually stream fairly demanding games like Far Cry 6 to an iPhone. However, Safari (and, to a lesser extent, Firefox) is far behind in terms of feature parity with Chrome for implementing Google's vision of Progressive Web Apps. In particular, Apple has announced that they don't intend to support a number of web APIs (Bluetooth, NFC, etc.) for privacy and security (and presumably business) reasons.
I build PWAs, there are main features I wish I could see on Safari/iOS.
1: Some kind of guarantee they're not going to randomly purge my assets/data to get some disk space back. I want to provide a good offline experience and not require a network connection.
2: Notifications, which has been requested for Safari every year for a decade. This is willful neglect and not esoteric new-in-chrome functionality or a security risk.
Apple did finally move WebRTC over from regular Safari to WebApp last year (Not every feature in mobile Safari is available as a WebApp). Finally! This opens up new potential. If they did the two above I'd be reasonably satisfied with the platform's capability.
I remember how Jobs was „attacked“ in an interview for not supporting adobe flash. They said it was because of his history with adobe, but jobs repeated all the time that HTML5 is going to be the future and adobe flash is old technology that has no future.
I understand the critique about their app store policy. But if you don‘t like their policy, don‘t build a „business“ depending on it. Or find a way around it. But stop crying in public and play the victim. Be creative, just like the people who invented the things our businesses rely on.
You can't easily use another delivery method for apps to iPhone users (that would require iPhone users to also buy and carry an Android device, which is a massive hassle).