Comment by abdullahkhalids 3 days ago
OT: Why is that Alphabet, Mozilla, Apple, etc can get together to create web standards that allow anyone to create software that works cross-platform - only a browser is needed, but Microsoft, Alphabet, Apple, Canonical, etc can't get together to create standards that allow anyone to create software that works cross-platform?
The browser is an extremely poor medium to deliver applications. It works, but barely, is a huge resource hog, fragile and it breaks way too often due to a lack of backwards compatibility between browser versions of the same manufacturer. I have a small app that I support and it's been fun to get it to work in the browser (instant cross platform support was indeed the driver) but the experience is still sub-par compared to what I could do on a local application.
Unfortunately, I think all these things are externalities - or at least, areas that don't impact revenue enough to get companies to change.
I too wish that software would be efficient, robust and long-lasting. But it seems that most people don't care about this enough (compared to other factors) to force change. (Alternatively, they are locked in to platforms they don't like to use.)
You could have clicked on my profile to find the app that you're criticizing unfairly. It does not use react, but it uses pure html5,css,js, it is extremely fast and light. And yet, there are things that it can not do simply because it runs in the browser, which is a poor operating system for a hard real time program to run under.
Apple make money from the App Store and from selling their hardware, so why should they want to invest on something that let people install software bypassing the App Store or that works on other platforms?
Alphabet make money from ads, so they want web pages, apps on Android and Chrome everywhere.
Mozilla make money from Google.
Microsoft make money from software licenses and subscriptions and from cloud services. They might be interested in cross platform installation.
At the moment what we have is PWA and WASM and icons on the desktop.
There are many projects that try to make cross-platform mobile apps easier, including Google's own Flutter. I haven't heard of them getting much cooperation from the teams working on Android or iOS, though.
At least for stuff that doesn't use device API's much, it seems like websites are the way to go. They're a whole lot easier to build than mobile apps.
The API surface becomes the lowest common denominator of all the platforms it supports, possibly with a path to support platform-native features, but probably in a way that’s necessarily not as good as native.
I think we already have plenty of avenue in ‘solutions’ like Electron to let people build bad apps.
Ah, I'm always up for a tangent.
The boring answer from Capt. Obvious. Incentive alignment.
That said, WebAssembly might be the trojan horse. While it started as a browser compile target, WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) is extending it beyond browsers into filesystem, networking, etc. etc. etc.
Fingers crossed, we may get cross-platform standards by accident.
Simple. It is not in their interest to do this. It is a lot of work, for no revenue.
You answered the question yourself: There is already a standard that allows anyone to create software that works cross-platform: the browser.