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Comment by gutnor | Hacker News Reader

You assume a specific implementation. In the movie, we only see the display moving from one screen to the other. That is a problem solved since the 80s with X-Window.

More recently, all enterprise application UI are actually web UI. So that's just moving a browser window from one screen to another, so just a refined Apple "Handover".

On a more hardcore fashion, we can move a whole VM almost seamlessly. At some point that could be the case with containers too and that may not be that far fetched to move single process after all.

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X-Window from the 80s… Are you trying to give us PTSD flashbacks?

Let’s see how many of these words sound familiar: Xinerama, Zaphod, XRandR.

Not to mention network transparency. So slow, so fragile, so never ever going to support audio or USB devices or video acceleration. I see Microsoft RDP and I weep. I wonder how the Sun Ray protocol compares.

Moving processes is possible, though impractical when devices have different processors. See the enduring appeal of things like Continuum for smartphones. Moving just parts of application state, like Apple’s Continuity, tends to have vendor lock-in and third-party adoption issues. So, similar problems as what a practical IoT ecosystem faces.

> all enterprise application UI are actually web UI

Yes, and so are most consumer apps, and "moving state" to another device is simply a question of IM'ing a link. Sure, the UI in the movie looks way cooler, but it's a movie.

That works for the barely double-digit percentage of apps which store all necessary state in the URL. In most cases, it's more like share a link, reauthenticate, get an unhelpful error page, use the navigation to get back to where you were, learn that the work you did first wasn't saved at all or that their eventual consistency means "same day" (e.g. iCloud), and hopefully they don't have some halfhearted attempt at locking which will prevent you from continuing. I suspect that if this feature ever arrives it'll be streaming rendered video like CarPlay/etc. because that's the only thing the device vendor can count on.

The point isn't that this is uncharted waters technically but that too many companies decided a good user experience isn't compatible with their desired profit margins. In some cases like security and bug fixes that might change due to regulation but that's far from certain and it's really hard to imagine that extending to broad interoperability.

Yes, for an app to successfully transfer state, it needs to be able to transfer state, that's a tautology.

But for webapps that want to be able to transfer state, the mechanism is the URL, and for those app, this works perfectly and unceremoniously well today.

The point I was responding to was your assertion that this was already true of most enterprise and consumer webapps:

> > all enterprise application UI are actually web UI > Yes, and so are most consumer apps, and "moving state" to another device is simply a question of IM'ing a link.

That's a great aspirational goal but it's simply not something which most people can assume will work – I still routinely find apps from major companies where you can't even use the back button within the same session!

Exactly, it's like all already there, working seamlessly, even most of the time free. For the users who really want/need this functionality, it seems to be very cheap to just research those options and configure them already (even if they don't come preconfigured by default on a new OS installation). So maybe it's just not such a sought-after feature?

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