You sir either are ignorant or too young. Did you know that Steve Jobs heavily promoted web apps on the iPhone and Eddy Cue had to convince him of an App Store in the first place. Apple is one of the first proponents of web apps on the phone!
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iOS 18.2 to Allow Third-Party Browser Web Apps With Custom Engines in EU
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This will come in handy in a few years when Apple abandons a device and stops updating WebKit, you’ll be able to download a browser that is current and get additional years out of an old device. 
Maybe - but your only remedy for that is to unfriend everybody you know who uses Google services (which includes a lot of Apple users, too).
Worth remembering that the EU isn't exactly giving Google and other tech giants a free ride - on privacy or market dominance - either. It's not a crusade against Apple - but sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
Exactly.
Chrome = Not allowed on my devices.
Firefox = The best currently available web browser, and what I'm using on my Mac right now.
When I want to use my phone, I pick up my phone
I don't understand the point of this feature at all. I've tried it a few times, got bored, shrugged then moved on...
What's the use case? Maybe rearranging icons like you previously could with iTunes?
I agree
I tried it when using a relatives 15" M2 MBA and I just ... don't understand the point
Everything just seemed more cumbersome to do this way
Usually all that happens on my phone when I'm not using it are messages coming in, which I'm getting on my Mac anyhow (and I'd rather reply on my Mac with the keyboard)
It feels like the ultimate "we did it because we can" feature, with no real useful purpose if we are being honest.
Yeah - I think the confusion was that, at the time of the iPhone release, for most people Rich Web Apps primarily meant Adobe Flash, and Jobs was adamant at not supporting that (which would have required an Adobe plug-in for Safari). Android briefly supported Flash (Apple is doomed!!!) but turns out - apart from security concerns - it just didn't work very well and rapidly got dropped.
Browsers did support Javascript/DOM - but Microsoft Internet Explorer was still king on the desktop and was gratuitously incompatible with standards, which was one of the reasons why Flash became dominant. Modern "Progressive Web App" support is now vastly improved and more portable - although Safari now tends to be the problem child when trying to write portable web apps (Apple dragged their feet on some new 'standard' browser features) it's nowhere near as problematic as IE.
The death of Flash was a good thing in the long term, but directly after the iPhone launch and the early years of Android "state of the art" Javascript/DOM webapps couldn't really compete with native Apps.
For the 99.9999999% of people there is no improvement. It is only the zealots who care.
IDK I find it fantastic and hardly ever touch my phone during the work day now. Different strokes for different folks I guess.
Another huge side benefit (that I know you in particular are not interested in, and doesn't apply to most people) is using the phone when I'm in my AVP.
Honestly the main use case is checking notifications as they come in. Most of my notifications don't come through on my Mac (really just Mail, Calendar, Messages, and Calls) so it's nice to be able to screen them and leave the phone in the pocket. Probably should cut down on notifications to be honest.
But I do have a few apps that either don't have Mac versions (Oura, Uber, DoorDash) or I haven't paid for the Mac Version (Carrot Weather) that I want to use or check a few times during the day.
Agreed - big life upgrade to do that for sure
I don't know when it finally became viable and reliable, but now on Sequoia and iOS 18 I've been able to reliably "delete & block" a couple Message threads I'm in that have a large mix of blue/green bubbles
I used to be subjected to endless ongoing back and forth political arguing in these threads I could never get out of (and still can't) -- but I SO appreciate finally having them buried, auto-deleted and blocked in a way where I never see them.
Both Google and Mozilla essentially stated that it is too costly to implement their own engines since they still need to maintain WebKit for the US. Maintaining both WebKit for the US and Blink/Gecko for the EU is cost-prohibitive. So unless the United States changes its laws, neither will implement their own engines.
That's a good use case. I can't use my personal laptop for work, and my company (hospital) doesn't offer Macs, so I'm stuck with Windows.
That said, the only notifications I have enabled are messages and calls.
Don’t use it then, no one is forcing you to.
It will be interesting to see if you can install Mozilla Firefox with its own Gecko web layout engine on iOS 18.2.
The third parties (and the incredibly specific profiles of users they create and sell) are the issue.
What cracks me up is the EU forcing Apple to allow different browsers with different browser engines because Apple has a monopoly on iOS with Safari.
Meanwhile, all this will do is make the Chromium engine (officially an open source engine with massive input from Google) a bigger monopoly than it already is. Quick, outside of Safari and Firefox… name a non-Chromium browser.
You can’t even get a WebKit browser on Windows. So you’re stuck with Firefox or Chromium. A or B. “Competition”, right?
It’s all BS.
Meanwhile, all this will do is make the Chromium engine (officially an open source engine with massive input from Google) a bigger monopoly than it already is. Quick, outside of Safari and Firefox… name a non-Chromium browser.
You can’t even get a WebKit browser on Windows. So you’re stuck with Firefox or Chromium. A or B. “Competition”, right?
It’s all BS.
I had Flash on my HTC Thunderbolt. It was very cumbersome. However, the sites I used weren’t mobile friendly yet, so on an iOS device, the page would show that blue Lego brick icon with a question mark.