Microsoft tried and failed to make a third alternative and force competition, spending billions to make it happen. As they found out, app makers don’t want to b

Microsoft tried and failed to make a third alternative and force competition, spending billions to make it happen. As they found out, app makers don’t want to build for yet another platform. It doesn’t matter whether you make an awesome mobile OS, you’ll never get the app makers to support you enough to convince the users, and without the users you cannot convince the app makers. Meanwhile, in desktop land, there are real alternatives because almost everything you’d want to do runs in the browser well enough (for regular home users at least). But on mobile the browsers are locked down, so the web is not a credible mobile app strategy. Linkedin and facebook oroginally tried a mobile web strategy and discovered that mobile browsers aren’t good enough. The lack of real competition, especially on iOS keeps mobile browsers underpowered for apps and maintains the strong gatekeeping function of mobile app stores. For me a possible solution is to force platform owners to allow real browser competition on their platforms (again: especially iOS) and hope that is enough to kickstart a browser arms race like we enjoyed on the desktop a decade ago, with the end result being that mobile web apps become a real alternative and we weed out much of the bad behavior by apple and google because they have a genuine competition for the native platform.