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Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

> Shira Ovide asks “a wild question: What if we played games, shopped, watched Netflix and read news on our smartphones — without using apps? Our smartphones, like our computers, would instead mostly be gateways to go online through a web browser.”

Correct me if I'm wrong but the iPhone actually did start that way, right? Apple only added an app store after the fact, because web apps weren't fast and functional enough, and the app store was a huge success with consumers.

I imagine in this alternate universe where web apps take off because Apple adds support for nonstandard functionality to Safari to accommodate user needs, people would be upset with them as well.

And at least for watching Netflix, reading news, shopping, and playing games, well, you can do that in a phone web browser now.

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If web apps "weren't fast and functional enough", users could run (native) programs instead.

There is nothing in that situation that necessitates an "App Store", through which Apple, instead of the iPhone owner, controls who can write, distribute and run programs on the computer, and profits from the work of third party developers.

When they extended this land grab to Apple laptops and desktops, was it because non-Apple approved applications "weren't fast and functional enough".

This. I don't think anybody, least of all Todd Weaver, is saying we should not have any native applications. When he writes "web", I think it's largely fair to substitute that with "http(s) APIs optionally fronted with web UIs".

The key is open standards and full freedom and control over your device, including what and how gets installed.

I fail to see the difference in the question Shira Ovide is asking. Web apps and app stores are equivalent from the point of view of end-user freedoms: in both cases, the code is controlled by someone else. Web browsers are even worse, because whatever code you have locally is transient and invalidated pretty much every other day.

Let me ask a different question: what if things that don't need to be services weren't a services? What if computing was primarily organized around end-user-controllable apps that only interface with remote services when needed?

(I.e. basically what we had on PC until recently.)

There is a substantial difference in that the app store is a middleman with the potential to control code between the user and the developer (intentionally explicitly ignoring the rare edge case of self-developed software).

On the web, the user can use any app in the world, but the app store limits the user to a specific pre-approved list of apps - there are both advantages and disadvantages to each approach, but that difference is meaningful.

It’s arguable that Apple launched without an app store because they were still cleaning up APIs and coming up with a plan. (And, arguably wise, if so. Apple Watch came out with door with an awful development experience.)

But, yeah, that’s what they started with. And WebOS. And Firefox OS. Where are those web-only operating systems now?

Seems like WebAssembly would allow for success where it previously failed.

WebAssembly lets you do all the things you could do with Java in the browser. And which weren't done.

With the plus that now a generation advocates it as if it was the very first of its kind.

There are three major differences at least. Hardware performance has come a long way. Eventually every phone will be capable of running WebAssembly without the user needing to install or configure anything. And there are no license fees needed to pay per device or per developer.

Yes, althought Symbian already had a Web Runtime by them, and besides having to deal with somewhat cumbersome C++ dialect (Symbian C++), everything that was more than relevant for application development, and the Pocket PC/Windows CE phones as well.

> Apple only added an app store after the fact, because web apps weren't fast and functional enough, and the app store was a huge success with consumers.

That's half correct. The iPhone was always meant to be able to install and run native apps, just because that's how all computers and phones worked back then. The concept of a web app was still pretty far away (Flash was the closest comparison). Even on day one most of the heavy lifting on iPhone was done by apps rather than the browser - email, messaging, music, YouTube, Maps etc.

The novel part was restricting the distribution of apps through their own store. If that hasn't happened, the alternative would be people simply downloading and running iPhone apps from all over the internet, as is standard on most other platforms including macOS.

When the iPhone first launched, Steve Jobs famously promoted web apps as "a very sweet solution". However, in typical Jobsian fasion, he had "forgotten" what he said a couple of months before the launch about the limitations of web apps[0].

[0]: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2007/06/13/a-very-sweet-solution/

depending on the speed of the hardware. With the new phones last few years speed is really not the problem. And you can do a lot of the web. Just not push notification.

Edit: by push notification I mean phone level push notification. When an web page is in the background it stops. And an app can have services running. Yeah and the netflix thing for content protection yeah you need an app.

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