"It's that he thinks that the web will win (over app stores). I strongly believe that he's right there."
"Whoever can make the Google of app discovery might make a temporary splash, but i bet that, not long after, people will return to plain old Google Search."
You remember me to Kodak's "people will return to make analog photos, people want to hold something in their hand".
You are deluding yourself, and you can't see what you have in front of your eyes.
No, there is not a single platform that works in everything. In my company we do both low level programming(c, c++[small controlled subset so we control it]. embedded, microcontrollers, hardware) , and high level programming (python, java, web programing in general) for scripts, testing , rapid prototyping or deployment...
Both of them work very well for what they are designed for.
If we paint something in the screen in c we could do it in 0.001 seconds(without hardware accel!!), in python it is 0.5 seconds, 500 slower!!. In the browser is like 500 if we were to do things on javascript. Most people fake and call webgl with hard pre calculations done in a server(native) "web programming". It is not.
And we use python a lot. Because we don't care if something takes 5 seconds to draw if this saves hours or days of debugging.
In the future communications will be better, and program interaction will be stronger, but that does not mean that all software will be web. Multiplattform native works also very well, and much better for some things.
"Given that the world's #1 mobile OS is made by the worlds #1 web company, this change is not difficult to predict."
Android is not web for a reason. It sucks for lots of things. It is not that Google has not tried, as it is in their best interest to do so.
The interest of a web company are something, and the interest of consumers are something else.
Consumers probably don't like having to be connected all day, all what they do in their computers being monitored in real time and stored forever by the NSA.
You probably are American but there is people living in other countries, with different interests. As Snowden said the NSA uses their tools for industrial espionage(as should be expected).
If you have a company outside the USA you will have no brain if you used web for your secret sauce. They will take it from you, they will give it to an American company and even patent it. With native it is orders of magnitude harder to do this.
I have to agree with this. It seems to me that people that think the web will win haven't tried deploying the same functionality via web and native app - the native app will be faster to develop and better.
Even Google seem to know this in their hearts. The Chrome team recently have started to acknowledge how far behind as a platform the web really is, and things like Google Now don't exist as websites at all.
The web simply has too many cases which don't work. For example, my current headache is the lack of wake lock style functionality, but the layout system is a trainwreck, the language tooling is abominable, and support for stuff like audio is a mess. All it has is ubiquity.
> "Android is not web for a reason. It sucks for lots of things. It is not that Google has not tried, as it is in their best interest to do so."
Google hasn't tried deep integration of web apps with Android. Their competing Chrome OS does and Chromebooks are a bestseller in 2013. Mobile Chrome doesn't have "apps" or plugins, like Firefox does, which is kind of disappointing. "Add to Homescreen" of favorite links was added in version 31 and current stable version is 32, so that's one version ago.
The reasons for this state of affairs can only be guessed, but given that you probably don't work for Google and you don't claim to have insider knowledge, I guess that quoted phrase is just pure speculation - and a much more sensible guess would be that delivering a native SDK that works well was faster than trying to push for new web standards (since Android was competing with iOS and second to market) ... something which they are doing with Chrome OS and Mozilla is doing with Firefox OS and it's a very different reason than your claim.
And if I am to make a prediction, I bet that in the future either we'll see Android and Chrome OS merging, or we'll see Chrome OS mobile devices, in addition to Android.
> "Consumers probably don't like having to be connected all day, all what they do in their computers being monitored in real time and stored forever by the NSA."
Web interfaces and offline access are not mutually exclusive. Chrome's offline GMail is pretty good these days. For PGP encryption in GMail's interface, I've been using: http://www.mailvelope.com/
Surely Chrome's permissions for extensions could be improved for better security, because as we've seen, perfectly legitimate extensions can turn over night to mallware/spyware/adware. And we would need new web standards for extensions and probably for doing client-side encryption, however these are not insurmountable problems. Either way, if you're using GMail, your unencrypted emails will get stored on their servers, whether you're using GMail's web interface or not.
> If you have a company outside the USA you will have no brain if you used web for your secret sauce. They will take it from you, they will give it to an American company and even patent it. With native it is orders of magnitude harder to do this.
I don't like the insult inherent in this message. I'm using web GMail and I'm not an US citizen. The problem is that Google is an US company, not that GMail is a web interface.
And in regards to clients and native apps - my trust for binary blobs is equal to my trust for web interfaces, which is zero. Basically I don't trust anything that's not open-source and developed in the open - as in, are you sure your operating system doesn't have backdoors planted? ... just saying, seeing that you're playing the trust card.
I live in a suburb of Los Angeles where every kid in the school district has been issued a chromebook. this is the kind of market share Google will capture. For better or worse.
You linked to the HTML5 Unreal Engine demo to demonstrate that JavaScript is competitive with C. But Unreal Engine is not written in JavaScript. It is written in C++.
Do you mean to say that this is the future of the web: software written using traditionally native languages, delivered in a compiled blob that the user can't inspect, but that has good performance?
This sounds more like native software encroaching on the web than the other way around.
"Whoever can make the Google of app discovery might make a temporary splash, but i bet that, not long after, people will return to plain old Google Search."
You remember me to Kodak's "people will return to make analog photos, people want to hold something in their hand".
You are deluding yourself, and you can't see what you have in front of your eyes.
No, there is not a single platform that works in everything. In my company we do both low level programming(c, c++[small controlled subset so we control it]. embedded, microcontrollers, hardware) , and high level programming (python, java, web programing in general) for scripts, testing , rapid prototyping or deployment...
Both of them work very well for what they are designed for.
If we paint something in the screen in c we could do it in 0.001 seconds(without hardware accel!!), in python it is 0.5 seconds, 500 slower!!. In the browser is like 500 if we were to do things on javascript. Most people fake and call webgl with hard pre calculations done in a server(native) "web programming". It is not.
And we use python a lot. Because we don't care if something takes 5 seconds to draw if this saves hours or days of debugging.
In the future communications will be better, and program interaction will be stronger, but that does not mean that all software will be web. Multiplattform native works also very well, and much better for some things.
"Given that the world's #1 mobile OS is made by the worlds #1 web company, this change is not difficult to predict."
Android is not web for a reason. It sucks for lots of things. It is not that Google has not tried, as it is in their best interest to do so.
The interest of a web company are something, and the interest of consumers are something else.
Consumers probably don't like having to be connected all day, all what they do in their computers being monitored in real time and stored forever by the NSA.
You probably are American but there is people living in other countries, with different interests. As Snowden said the NSA uses their tools for industrial espionage(as should be expected).
If you have a company outside the USA you will have no brain if you used web for your secret sauce. They will take it from you, they will give it to an American company and even patent it. With native it is orders of magnitude harder to do this.