> desktop and phone UIs are little walled-off boxes that can’t interact with anything shared except saved files First, this is not true, as they are also able

> desktop and phone UIs are little walled-off boxes that can’t interact with anything shared except saved files First, this is not true, as they are also able to communicate through the clipboard. And second, the point of the file is to have a durable form for the data. A VR world is still going to use files. EDIT : In fact, these two modalities of working with data directly stem from the hardware : "live" memory of the clipboard in the always powered Random Access Memory versus "dead" memory of the files in the 'hard' drive which keeps storing information when unpowered. Maybe there are other potential modalities than these two, but I personally am unable to imagine them. (I guess that there's an 'in-between' with logs stored as files, but that have their most ancient information regularly erased... which ends up happening with any information, regardless of the storage format, given enough time !) EDIT2 : And we both forgot about the concept of databases, which tend to be more complex in abstraction than filesystems, and can either exist in parallel or on top of a filesystem, and which many apps definitely use. But they obviously have to compose too with the underlying bit-juggling hardware.