Platform Strategy and Its Discontents

I agree with points about openness and gate keeping. But from my point of view, the web is the worst platform to run apps.

I worked on microcontrollers, system software, desktop software, mobile apps, games and now I am a full stack web developer who mostly does backend and defers most of the front-end tasks to colleagues.

I don't like JS frameworks and it was far more enjoyable for me to use QT, Borland C++Builder, Windows Forms XCode and Android Studio than to use Angular and React and even Vue.

Aside from Web front-end to being a less enjoyable experience for me, the Web was designed for websites, not for apps. Web as an app platform means subpar experience for the users, too.

We tried with Flash and Java applets running in the browser. Those died and now we have the Javascript mess.

When, if ever, Wasm will have full access to browser DOM, maybe we can get rid of the Javascript mess. But then, again, why bother running a binary app in the browser when you can run it on the desktop or phone?

And even if web as an app platform is said to promote openness and impede gatekeeping it still has a terrible downside for the end user: it makes the user rent the software instead of owning it.

I'm looking at the list of top websites and thinking "when have I ever wanted to install the mobile app?" The only one I see that I use is Spotify. Maybe the time spent on mobile is in other apps?

But I'm probably an outlier because I spend most of my time on websites, even on phone and tablet.

It would be nice to see this broken down by market segment. I don't see any banks in the list. I use my bank's app for certain reasons like depositing checks and Zelle.

The article refers to the JS-industrial-complex but only has stats for NextJS[1]. Maybe other frameworks are better? I would love to see a similar chart for the showcases of other frameworks.

[1]: https://infrequently.org/2024/10/platforms-are-competitions/...

This is a very good article and I agree with most of it. I never really understood why React and Angular became big for the general web. They have a lot of usage in enterprise applications, where you typically access them from a “pc”, but even then they suck on the tablets your employees drive around with. At least for the most part they don’t suck that much worse than the terrible native clients that came before (and still do in the rare case that a supplier actually build a native mobile app). Why that spread to the wider web is beyond me though. I get why you would use it for personal projects if it’s your day time job anyway, but a page reload never hurt anyone.

I personally think that the most responsible “father” is finance. The article states that there is more money with the web, but in my experience it’s far easier to lock down payments through apps. I agree that part of this is because native apps are better on mobile, but they are also much easier to work with and consume. It’s not easy to make payments function well on the web while in a native app it’s just a click with well powered api behind it. Serving both users and developers. Now, it probably could be easier on the web, but who would deliver it? The article calls out Apple and to some degree Google as guilty of not making browsers competitive with mobile apps, but why would they? If anything it’s in their best interest to keep the web shitty on mobile.

Pretty solid take on a roiling shitstorm that's been brewing for at least the last 15 years. One thing I strongly disagree with the author about is wanting the web to win. Of all possible outcomes the web coming out on top of the platform wars is the worst available. Simple fact of the matter is the web wasn't built for any of this shit as our bloated and still wildly insecure browsers demonstrate rather vividly. The web defaulting back to a largely static information display medium would free up so much client budget and development hours it's hard to imagine that multi-OS support for native apps wouldn't be a net savings over the long haul. Hell, just imagine the kinds of resources that would free up if forced migration of highly dynamic websites was a thing of the past (yeah I'm looking at you Drupal).

I have some sympathy for this viewpoint. And I think Alex’s heart is in the right place—Nextjs is a dumpster fire and react server components are when react finally jumped the shark for me.

Maybe if we had HTML6 we wouldn’t be in this scenario. HTML5 was great but form building on the web (without JS) is a second-rate experience. And it’s even more miserable once JS is in the mix, but hey developers can provide a much better UX for end users than HTML and CSS alone could possibly provide.

Sorry Alex, but without JS the web would have died a decade ago as phones took over. It’s only JS that keeps us in the ring.

What does the OP mean by "web" in this context?

- UI running in browsers?

- TCP/IP?

- HTTP(S)?

I personally think ReST APIs accessed over HTTP + TCP/IP have a lot of utility but I think we can do better on the UI front. Maybe we need an alternative to the web browser that can run a different (or variety of) languages other than Javascript, with a better presentation option than the DOM.

How bad will it be if we will run apps on desktop and phones instead of the web?

Does the Facebook app provide a worse experience on the phone than the web app? Is Gmail phone app worse than Gmail web app?