> The web status quo sucks at a technical level (...) I know you mean that it sucks when viewed from the perspective of an application developer, and I agree w

> The web status quo sucks at a technical level (...) I know you mean that it sucks when viewed from the perspective of an application developer, and I agree with you. However, on a technical merit perspective, the web is much more evolved, and much more a technical feat, than either Android or iOS. Android and iOS are a reiteration of what has been done cyclically through times, ever since the first OS got written. A set of libraries and associated APIs on top of a constrained set of hardware. The web is, as an application platform, a set of APIs. That's it. There's no defined hardware, no defined set of libraries. Guess what? Designing the API alone is much more difficult, a lot harder to get right, and much more of a technical feat. On one side, some libraries got written and then documented. On the other, everything is defined conceptually (well, not really; if done like this it would be really impossible instead of just difficult, but the point stands).