Apple vs Freedom: How Killing PWAs Accelerates the Web3 Transition
Apple gutted PWA support on iOS as a response to the European Union’s Digital Markets Act — the regulation that would have forced iOS to support alternative browsers with real hardware access, not just Safari wrappers.
Their reasoning was simple: if they couldn’t control the browser layer, they’d rather remove the capabilities entirely. And in doing so, they accidentally made the strongest case yet for Web3 architecture.
The Storage Problem
Here’s what most people miss about the PWA decision: it’s not just about “installing web apps on your home screen.” It’s about persistent storage.
PWAs gave developers a way to store data on a user’s device without going through the App Store or Play Store. Local databases, cached assets, offline functionality — all accessible through a browser, no gatekeeper required.
When Apple killed that capability, they eliminated the only path developers had to device storage outside the native app ecosystem. If you want your users to store anything locally, you now have to play by Apple’s rules, submit to their review process, and pay their 30% cut.
Unless you rethink where “storage” lives entirely.
The Web3 Alternative
This is where the shift gets interesting. If you can’t store data on the device, you need somewhere else to put it. And blockchain-based storage — lightweight, encrypted, even partial versions of application components — starts making a lot of sense.
The model looks like this: instead of your app being a self-contained package that lives on a device, it becomes a cryptographic interface. The application itself is thin — a decoder, essentially. The actual content and data live on IPFS or similar decentralized storage, encrypted and accessible only to those with the right keys.
Your app doesn’t store anything. It decrypts and renders content that exists on a distributed network.
A Concrete Example
Take something like Excalidraw — the open-source diagramming tool. Today, if you want to save and share diagrams, you’re dependent on either local storage (which Apple just took away) or a centralized server.
But imagine uploading that diagram to IPFS instead. It’s content-addressed, encrypted, and available from any node on the network. You share it by sharing a key, not a URL to someone’s server. Anyone with the right access can view or download it from a web page — or maybe they don’t even need to download it, because they have cryptographic access to render it directly.
The content lives on a non-indexed, non-crawlable layer of the internet. It’s not on Google. It’s not on Apple’s servers. It’s just there, distributed across the network, owned by no one and accessible to those who should have access.
The New Frontier
This is the challenge — and the opportunity — for developers right now. We need to build software architectures that use Web3 not as a buzzword, but as a practical response to platform monopolies.
The argument isn’t ideological. It’s architectural. When a company can unilaterally remove your ability to store data on hardware that your users purchased and own, the rational engineering response is to stop depending on that company’s permission.
Decentralized storage. Cryptographic interfaces. Thin clients that decode rather than contain. These aren’t futuristic concepts — they’re the pragmatic answer to a very present problem.
We should have the right to use the hardware we buy to the full extent of its capabilities. When platform owners restrict that right, we build around the restriction. That’s what engineers do.
Diego Jiménez Vergara — AI Infrastructure & DevOps Engineer. Building for an open web from Mexico City.