These shenanigans make me wonder why they don't just focus on making HTML5 apps a better experience. If they provided better widgets (e.g. including swipe gestures, which Angular/Polymer/MDL don't) and access to native hardware we'd be set.
HTML5 is just 100X easier and nicer to program with than that abomination of Android Studio followed by aligning, keysigning, and other steps.
The HTML5 hello world is
<html><body>Hello World</body></html>
The native hello world is no less than 74 files of garbage, Gradle configurations, and other nonsense.
You're free to make web pages if you like but despite your complaints, you yourself admit that its not a better experience and its not for lack of effort.
Because there's no clear way to get a cut from payments for web apps. Nobody will pay 30% to Apple if there's a way to avoid doing that and web app would be a way to do so.
If all you want to do is deviate from standards on purpose, just change
<html>
to
<apple_ml>
and base64 encode the .html file (for no reason) and call the resulting file .iapp. Done. Standards broken. Proprietary status achieved with minimal effort. Change ".css" to ".bss" if you want to go the extra mile.
and leave everything else as-is? Sounds like a win-win for both developers and biz dev.
HTML5 is just 100X easier and nicer to program with than that abomination of Android Studio followed by aligning, keysigning, and other steps.
The HTML5 hello world is
The native hello world is no less than 74 files of garbage, Gradle configurations, and other nonsense.