app stores which are dictatorships The 1990s called. They want their metaphor back. Let's face it: The "dictatorship" metaphor was fun (Remember the cartoons

app stores which are dictatorships The 1990s called. They want their metaphor back. Let's face it: The "dictatorship" metaphor was fun (Remember the cartoons with the X-wing fighter torpedoing the AT&T Death Star logo? Good times.) but it was probably overwrought even back in the old days when DOS software and Mac software and each of the 23 different Unices were binary incompatible and emulation was dog slow and virtualization was like science fiction and choosing a platform felt like proposing marriage. But now? It might even be a dangerous line of thinking. You need to learn to think like your customer, and they don't see this oh-so-crucial distinction between "native apps" and "web apps". Except to the extent that web apps are a trifle more difficult to find: Instead of finding the pretty icon and touching it, you have to touch Safari and then type the name of your desired app into the Googles. (No, of course the average customer doesn't know how to bookmark a URL. They don't know what a URL is.) A defining characteristic of the metaphorical "dictatorship" is that people can't vote. In particular: They can't vote with their feet, because the wall is too high or the ocean too wide or the border guards (on whichever side of the border) are too expensive to bribe. But there are only two kinds of native-app platforms today: A) The platforms in which a full-featured HTML5-compliant browser is at most two clicks away at any time; B) The platforms that are being crushed to death by iOS, Android, and the other platforms in Category A. Where's the big barrier here? Half of my native apps embed entire HTML5 web pages. Or they link out to HTML5 web pages. Meanwhile, an increasing quantity of web pages prompt me to install native apps. The answer to "web apps or native apps" is "both", to the degree that they interpenetrate and are inseparable, and what reason is there to believe that this won't continue? Developers obviously care about their release schedules and their profit share and the backend technology underlying each and every screen on the phone, but customers don't know and they don't much care.