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Can a program written for the web access all the great sensors on your Android or iPhone? Can it access new movies and TV shows? The web is a big success stor

• kobeya 9y ago
  I hate the browser as a platform, but the answers to your questions are yes, and yes.
  • chubot 9y ago
    The web can't access all the sensors on your phone -- at least not in their full glory. It might have trivial APIs like "take a picture", but it can't do anything specific to a piece of hardware, by definition. It can't control the camera's imaging pipeline (lighting, focus, preprocessing, etc.). As a shortcut to understanding this, consider what hardware support something like ARKit [1] needs. Or consider whether you could write a multitrack audio recorder as a web app (no, because the web audio APIs aren't multitrack). My point is that you need "general purpose computing" that is not the web for many things. The web is indeed open, but we also need our general purpose computers to be open. Android is better than nothing, but it's arguably not as open as a PC running Linux. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/arkit/about_augmented_reality_and_arkit https://developer.apple.com/documentation/arkit/about_augmen... The answer to the second question is also no.
• zerostar07 9y ago
  I think it can , but if your website needs to use these things, then it essentially locks itself in the "app garden" we 're talking about escaping from.
• rimliu 9y ago
  Amusing, how people fear monoculture on one hand, but a longing to have everyting as the web app on the other. For what is worth it is good web apps cannot access everything.