> If it was really so hard to beat the web, why is all the innovation on smartphones in the native app space, with web devs getting the crumbs years later after

> If it was really so hard to beat the web, why is all the innovation on smartphones in the native app space, with web devs getting the crumbs years later after various Apple/Google/Microsoft talking shops have finished finalising and shipping WebTiltSensor or whatever feature we have in mind? Because platforms have different strengths. It's obviously not hard to design a better platform than the web for apps. What I'm arguing is that you can't take one of those clean room implementation and turn it into a truly cross-platform standard. As popular as iOS, Android, Java, Flash, QT and whatever else are or have been, they are still hamstrung by being single-vendor efforts. The web on the other hand is table stakes for any new computing device, on the manufacturer's dime—it's not cost center or support burden for the platform "owner". This is a world of difference that's hard to overstate. > The entire "app revolution" that followed the iPhone launch was more or less a huge slap in the face to the web platform. Why? Again, they have different strengths. If you need high performance, and access to hardware then you have to go native. Of course all innovation will happen in closed environments where the vendor can control the full stack and move quickly. There was no way a loose set of open standards like the web can compete with that, the results should surprise no one. But does this mean apps are going to eclipse the web? No! Because there is still a high threshold of trust to install an app. As much as the web security model is a mess, it also has been reasonably successful at isolating the hardware environment from the on-demand functionality it delivers. Can you imagine a world where you only ever install apps for everything and never use the web? Even if you use Google and Facebook's apps, there will always be a long tail that you aren't willing to install, and the web is there for that use case. Because of this, companies have to continue developing websites to serve the top of the funnel, and as they do so, they will demand more and more standards to tie into hardware etc, so slowly web standards will creep in and commoditize functionality which today is only available via native APIs. More fundamentally, I think you underestimate the sort of worse-is-better strength of the web being document-centric but support app-like functionality. There are far more documents than apps in the world, and many of the apps deal with things resembling documents. So the web has this incredible low barrier to entry where you can throw some documents online, and then slowly build functionality around it. If you're working on apps all day, and living in SV, it's easy to see the warts and lose sight of what a powerful dynamic this is for web adoption. I hope you can prove me wrong and come up with an idea that can revolutionize the web, it's just that it runs counter to my observation about the forces that shape standards and technology ecosystems at a higher level than individual minds and platforms.