It's tough to get developers to care about things like offline-first, because it's tough for them to convince managers to allow them to spend time on a feature that won't work on iOS (since it won't work in Safari, and Apple has banned other browser engines on their platform).
Ultimately it's users that lose out but also the web as a platform, as it pushes people, like the author of the article, towards walled-garden solutions like native apps.
Apple is looking for service worker use-cases, so if it's something you're interested in, let them know https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2017-July/0292....
When the iPod came out, I never understood why I couldn't just drag the music files directly onto the device and I had to get iTunes and use iTune's tedious interface.
Now they have the app store; another unnecessary restriction. As a developer, it's nice to own an Android phone because I can just run whatever code I want on it and I don't need to buy any special licenses, hardware or proprietary SDKs to do that.
I understand where you're coming from, I do. But when it comes to a phone, I greatly prefer the standardized hardware/interface/OS over the free for all. I hate to use the "it just works" nonsense, but that is exactly what it does.
Working in the Enterprise, the iPhone is infinitely easier for us to troubleshoot, and manage. Because everyone is running the same thing.
Your argument seems to indicate that you just like iPhones better. Otherwise, I think you would have said "I'd prefer that our company either standardize on one model of Android phone or the iPhone." because both would have the same effect - things would be easier to troubleshoot and manage since everyone would be running the same thing.
Anyway, currently as an iPhone user I think Apple comes up massively short on basic features. For instance - on an $800 phone they're missing a physical message-waiting indicator light! That's completely absurd to me. Some others: You can't have multiple users (and this is big for the Enterprise). You can't put app icons wherever you want, you have to stick them all together in one big pile on the screen. You can't see the time a text message came in until you perform a non-obvious gesture. You can't see anything useful in the call history list until you click an item. You can't even change the default browser!
It's no wonder to me why Enterprise customers don't standardize on the iPhone - they'd be giving up all control to Apple.
I do use an Android phone on a regular basis, and there it's useful, since it only pops up when important messages arrive (read: on-call stuff).
But my daily driver is an iPhone, and sorry - this would be an absolute mess with the amount of apps installed trying to notify me of things. It's virtually impossible to determine what notifications or messages are important. Is a waze notification that a friend will almost arrive important? Not really. Is a waze notification that I should leave in 10 minutes important since the traffic isn't optimal? Absolutely. Relying on such an indicator simply doesn't work the moment you have dozens and dozens of apps installed that all send you mostly mundane low priority messages, but from time to time want to tell you something you really want to know.
In my case, a light like that would be on all the time or off when you actually have a pretty important notification - which would mean you simply cannot rely on it. Notifications are already too complex, and at the same time too limited. Simplifying it into a colored light is just adding to that mess.