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My "in three years" remark was meant to indicate when the web model's downsides will become irrelevant. But i think the web is winning right now. The desktop is
by Joeri 16y ago
My "in three years" remark was meant to indicate when the web model's downsides will become irrelevant. But i think the web is winning right now. The desktop is going webbased faster and faster. It doesn't seem so if you look at games and media software, yet, but in the enterprise market you're laughed out of the room if you don't have a web app. Native apps lost that fight a while ago. They lost for a simple reason: the deployment model is superior, and the app quality of web apps was good enough.
Back to mobile, the app stores make it way easier to ship native apps, and the browsers make it harder to deploy web apps. The consequence is that on mobile native still wins. The app stores may turn out to be better than the web for shipping apps. The web won't win that fight by making it easier to build better apps, it will only do so by making it easier to ship.
- nupark2 16y agoWe're talking about the modern landscape of native applications -- iOS, Android -- in which apps certainly have not "lost". The legacy desktop application distribution model you're referencing -- one in which a toolbar can spy on you -- is fading away. The web has the distribution problem solved, but as an application technology platform, it's horrible. Now that we've got a route forward with distribution of native apps, the native app market is growing by leaps and bounds, and it's the web that needs to catch up. What I'd like to see is a common application platform, PNaCL based, with consistent high-level APIs .. but that would NOT be the web as we know it. It would be another native application platform.