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> It's been huge leap in reducing cost to build, distribute, learn and use apps. Citation needed. 20 years ago you could make a commercial app with a GUI in n

> It's been huge leap in reducing cost to build, distribute, learn and use apps. Citation needed. 20 years ago you could make a commercial app with a GUI in no time with things like Delphi or Visual Basic. Now to do the same we have to learn several standards and languages and libs/frameworks and build tools and server admin tools and...

andykx 6y ago
I mean, websites (and apps) are cross platform. That fact alone reduces a ton of development time and mental overhead.
- adrianN 6y ago
  You could do cross platform UI with Java. It was slow, ugly and poorly integrated with the rest of the OS unless you put in extra effort for each platform.. Just like applications running in the browser today.
  - andykx 6y ago
    I struggle to conceive an alternative. I don't want to download a native app every time I want to access my bank account or browse Twitter, for example. Web applications, despite their glaringly obvious flaws, are undeniably convenient.
remus 6y ago
I think the key differentiator is in distribution. If you build a web app it's immediately available to a sizable proportion of the human population (not that they'll necessarily use it). Getting similar reach with something offline is much harder. As you say it's still not trivial (legacy browsers, funny standards, technical challenges of serving loads of users etc.) but Id argue it is substantially easier than the challenges involved in making a program written in visual basic available to billions of people.
- jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
  People back then downloaded the program and ran it. Online distribution, web browsing, etc. was already a very common thing 20 years ago, specially in certain countries and businesses. And publishers were readily available too, like for any other physical item. If something was wanted, it did not matter, it would sell and distribute itself. Take a look at things like Lotus, Office, Windows, Doom...
  - ACS_Solver 6y ago
    I strongly prefer the native, compiled software of the old days, and dislike webapps. There's only a handful of webapps that I find useful and usable, while the majority feels unresponsive, resource hungry, and generally a step back from late-90s software. At the same time, I absolutely think it's the online distribution of webapps that is the killer feature. People only need a URL. There's no download and install process (and the less tech-literate users often had difficulties with that), and perhaps even more importantly, there's no patching. As a developer, you know that all your users are running the latest version you got deployed. You don't have version 1.0, 1.01 and 1.12 floating around the Web as downloads, you don't have to beg people to download and install the patches, you just deploy to the production server and that's an automatic update for everyone. That is IMO why browsers won as an application platform. In my very limited experience coding for the web, it's a remarkably bad application platform. You don't have many useful primitives. You don't really have a choice of language. You're beating protocols meant for documents into submission so they become useful for apps. It's more difficult to create a UI than it was in Visual Basic, Delphi or Borland C++, and so on. But for all of that, you get an application that someone can start using after clicking one link, and that will transparently auto-update.
    - jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
      With Stores those points are solved. Prominent ones like Valve, Apple, Google, Microsoft etc offer automatic updates, URL discovery, one-click install and stuff like that. They even have extra benefits, like reviews from actual users vs marketing landing pages of web software. Browsers have "won" for other reasons: licensing control, unavoidable analytics, subscription mechanics... All that combined is a dream for a publisher.

andykx 6y ago

I mean, websites (and apps) are cross platform. That fact alone reduces a ton of development time and mental overhead.

adrianN 6y ago
You could do cross platform UI with Java. It was slow, ugly and poorly integrated with the rest of the OS unless you put in extra effort for each platform.. Just like applications running in the browser today.
- andykx 6y ago
  I struggle to conceive an alternative. I don't want to download a native app every time I want to access my bank account or browse Twitter, for example. Web applications, despite their glaringly obvious flaws, are undeniably convenient.

remus 6y ago

I think the key differentiator is in distribution. If you build a web app it's immediately available to a sizable proportion of the human population (not that they'll necessarily use it). Getting similar reach with something offline is much harder. As you say it's still not trivial (legacy browsers, funny standards, technical challenges of serving loads of users etc.) but Id argue it is substantially easier than the challenges involved in making a program written in visual basic available to billions of people.

jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
People back then downloaded the program and ran it. Online distribution, web browsing, etc. was already a very common thing 20 years ago, specially in certain countries and businesses. And publishers were readily available too, like for any other physical item. If something was wanted, it did not matter, it would sell and distribute itself. Take a look at things like Lotus, Office, Windows, Doom...
- ACS_Solver 6y ago
  I strongly prefer the native, compiled software of the old days, and dislike webapps. There's only a handful of webapps that I find useful and usable, while the majority feels unresponsive, resource hungry, and generally a step back from late-90s software. At the same time, I absolutely think it's the online distribution of webapps that is the killer feature. People only need a URL. There's no download and install process (and the less tech-literate users often had difficulties with that), and perhaps even more importantly, there's no patching. As a developer, you know that all your users are running the latest version you got deployed. You don't have version 1.0, 1.01 and 1.12 floating around the Web as downloads, you don't have to beg people to download and install the patches, you just deploy to the production server and that's an automatic update for everyone. That is IMO why browsers won as an application platform. In my very limited experience coding for the web, it's a remarkably bad application platform. You don't have many useful primitives. You don't really have a choice of language. You're beating protocols meant for documents into submission so they become useful for apps. It's more difficult to create a UI than it was in Visual Basic, Delphi or Borland C++, and so on. But for all of that, you get an application that someone can start using after clicking one link, and that will transparently auto-update.
  - jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
    With Stores those points are solved. Prominent ones like Valve, Apple, Google, Microsoft etc offer automatic updates, URL discovery, one-click install and stuff like that. They even have extra benefits, like reviews from actual users vs marketing landing pages of web software. Browsers have "won" for other reasons: licensing control, unavoidable analytics, subscription mechanics... All that combined is a dream for a publisher.