Hacker News Reader

Comment by denton-scratch | Hacker News Reader

It was always obvious that Play Stores and their captive developer "communities" were a trap. Forced API upgrades are just one aspect of that.

There are certainly tasks that are best done by a phone or mobile app; usually, these are things that involve moving around, such as navigation, or depend on phone sensors, such as working out which way is "up". But nearly everything else can be done by a website.

I'd hate to be a one-man developer trying to maintain a cross-platform mobile app. I sympathise. But strictly from the sidelines; I long ago decided that I wasn't interested in playing games with proprietary platforms and gatekeepers.

View on HN

> There are certainly tasks that are best done by a phone or mobile app; usually, these are things that involve moving around, such as navigation, or depend on phone sensors, such as working out which way is "up". But nearly everything else can be done by a website.

Actually, both of those things can easily be done in a browser app.

About the only thing that can't be done easily on mobile right now is GPU compute shaders. But that will also fall when WebGPU merges from desktop browsers.

The only other thing I can think of is generic, system-wide file management. That probably won't ever be coming. Though the File System API does allow users to grant access to specific directories, I don't think the permission persists past a page reload.

> It was always obvious that Play Stores and their captive developer "communities" were a trap. Forced API upgrades are just one aspect of that.

I was convinced the app stores would be a flop because I didn’t think there would be a critical mass of developers that were willing to give up the guarantee they could actually deploy their apps.

The big problem with this logic is that devs have to go where the users are if they want their money, no matter what.

Funny reading this on a site that regularly tears into Google for not adequately gatekeeping software on Android and advertises iPhones as better because they police more aggressively.

I see cognitive dissonance on this site every day. Android or rather Chrome supports web apps, and Android allows apps not from the play store, unlike Apple, and yet people complain about both sides.

They'd also complain if Android allowed a loophole to violate privacy by targeting old insecure apis.

But you don't want to be ideological about user sovereignty over their own devices, do you? Be smart and pragmatic instead, and walk the path of least resistance into a cage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com