I recently wrote about my decision to move completely to the web as an app development platform and some of the tradeoffs involved. My iOS apps are currently free and will disappear from the App Store in a few months.
Despite the web’s challenges, there’s much that excites me about its future and and some of these characteristics are intrinsic to the platform:
- The concept of instant games promotes highly shareable apps via a simple link that require no install process: show up and start.
- Having multiple payment providers, potentially with the addition of cryptocurrencies means if you wanted to also just invent your own value system, maybe some kind of post-money coupon thing, it’s possible to integrate with existing systems…
- User-controlled personal data stores are already being used on the web and will eventually make their way to native apps.
- Edge apps that work completely in the browser are easy to mirror or fork, and virtually free to distribute: imagine having your site/app available everywhere via IPFS
- The culture of perpetual improvement, with less focus on versioning, is normal: people do not need to ‘install updates’ for each app they use on every change.
- It’s just more fun and with a lower barrier to entry, which results in more diverse and dynamic communities who form part of a larger public commons: more sparks, more life, more weird.