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Web & mobile development took a wrong tern 10 million miles back, and no one wants to turn the car around and admit it.
What’s possible for web apps today is insane considering where it started. I remember when AJAX was a brand new technology, and now you can do videoconferences with screenshare right in a web browser.
I think the push toward apps is because of influence from mobile. Everyone wants their own app, just like everyone wanted a dot com in the 90s. Hopefully we’ll stabilize around browsers and open standards.
Hopefully we’ll stabilize around browsers and open standards.
I would love this, but I think it will require major privacy reform. The push toward apps comes overwhelmingly from a single source: surveillance capitalism.
Not just privacy reform, but also mandated interoperability between services
mandated interoperability
What you are describing was called Web 2.0. It didn’t work out.
The push towards apps is due to a collection of corporate interests that are of dubious value to the end user.
Apple, Google, and Microsoft prefer apps over websites because they can exert much more control over their functionality and operation (as well as collect that sweet sweet 30% royalty on all digital purchases). This is why they intentionally make Home Screen bookmarks so unintuitive and inconvenient compared to downloading an app (at least on iOS and Windows; not sure about Android). They’re also more difficult to make cross-platform, although this is becoming less and less of an issue as cross-platform libraries evolve).
App developers push for apps because they’re much stickier (especially due to the aforementioned bookmark situation; it’s all very intentional). Their app is right at the user’s fingertips until they explicitly decide to delete it. For streaming services and the like, app SDKs also tend to offer more robust DRM than their browser counterparts. That’s why, e.g., Hulu cripples their streaming bandwidth on browsers like Edge while their Windows app is not, even though their Windows app is very obviously just an Edge WebView 2 window. It’s pathetic, but it’s something they can point to in a meeting with their investors and say, “See? We’re doing something about piracy!” as if one trip to a piracy website doesn’t refute all their hard work.
It took a wrong turn in the 90s. There's been no real feasible way to fix it without breaking the web for many decades now. Some things are just forever despite their problems, like QWERTY.
So let's break the dang web
I'm working on a little project to try this out.
Yes, I couldn't recommend htmx highly enough.
Half the problem is that js was made over a weekend and we cant seem to come up with a different solution.
WASM
Even if wasm or something else could replace js completely we'd need some huge corp to drop support completely.
Something like apple no longer supporting js. Remember Flash?
For cross-platform apps, Flutter is the future