The mechanism to add a web app to the home screen has remained pretty unchanged from iPhoneOS 1.0 (2007) to iOS 18 (2024) – you tap the action button (sometimes called the “share” button despite it being a misnomer), then you tap “Add to Home Screen”. It’s the same as adding a bookmark, printing, or sharing the link with somebody.

That is the process they designed before the App Store existed when they were telling everybody if you want to build apps for the iPhone then they should be web apps, so I don’t think you can reasonably consider this process to be intentionally difficult.

This changed slightly in iOS 26 because you need to tap the meatball icon to bring up the menu and pick “Share…”, but given that this only happened six months ago, I don’t think that’s what you were referring to by “in the past”?

> They probably dont know the difference between an app rendered with a browser or a truly native app.

Absolutely, users do not know or care what technology you are using so long as it meets their expectations of use. Users are going to the app store as a discovery mechanism for "something that gives them an icon on the phone to get to that thing", most have no clue what "native code" means.