Platform specific "apps" vs. HTML-based "apps"?

Platform specific "apps" vs. HTML-based "apps"?

Posted Dec 13, 2012 9:10 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Platform specific "apps" vs. HTML-based "apps"? by dowdle
Parent article: A simulated FirefoxOS experience

Because as I said, a significant number of "apps" are really just front-ends to web-based services that should work fine in a browser.

True.

Having to maintain custom builds for each environment is the opposite of what is desired by developers.

I'm not so sure. Form-factors are too different. It's really hard to produce single GUI which works for smartphone, tablet and desktop. And only desktop requires an webapp (because there are no similar delivery channel for traditional applications).

Google with their Chrome browser is trying, I believe but perhaps I misunderstood, to offer a binary runtime environment so they can distribute binaries that run in the browser so browser-based applications don't necessarily have to be HTML/javascript-based.

Sure. As one of NaCl developers I know that very well indeed. But if this is not an admission of webapps failure then I don't know what is. I mean: once you are starting to write "webapps" in C++ with Qt what's there left from the webapps hype? Delivery channel?

It is probably easier to take a mature desktop OS and scale it down for small screen with touch features... than it is to scale a simple GUI shell up to a full-blown desktop environment.

Again: why do you think that? It didn't work that way on minicomputers, it didn't work that way on desktop, why will it work that way on smartphones?

The fact of the matter: it's much easier to scale something up rather then to scale something down. Especially when FOSS is involved: when you need to scale up you just grab bits and pieces from the bigger things and attach them to the existing base, but to scale down you need to somehow cut out the fat yet keep the experience usable.

All the teams (GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, Windows) did that in the same fashion: destroy everything and build new experience from the bits and pieces. But this basically puts them at the beginning of the race again and gives Android huge headstart! Exactly the wrong way to win the race.

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