If service workers were invented, PWAs were a thing, or Servo had been built, Mozilla's actions around Firefox OS would probably have been much different.
What really killed Firefox OS was the lack of ecosystem. VP of Apps Rick Fant put all the emphasis on apps for Firefox OS instead of Firefox for Android. Firefox OS could run any app built for F4A, but not the other way around. Why would I, as an engineer, write an app for a device that I can hardly get my hands on, running an operating system almost nobody uses, with customers who (in many cases) don't want to pay $0.99 for an app, using APIs that don't work on anything else, and translate it to a language you don't speak? There were millions of F4A users at the time, and Mozilla made no effort to get folks to build for it at all. A real shame.
Feels like this has been 2-3 years out for almost as long as "native apps" have existed.
Reminds me of the first scene in "Snatch" -
Turkish: What's happening with them sausages, Charlie?
Sausage Charlie: Five minutes, Turkish.
Turkish: It was two minutes five minutes ago.
The part I'm still concerned about is UI performance - it's still miles off native.
Many times needlessly low expectations of both developers and managers are the blame for this. Yes, there are certain elaborate UI effects that are genuinely difficult to do well on web. But when there's a full second lag after pressing a button, or a menu slides into view at 3fps, the platform is not the problem.
A native app that has incredibly choppy, laggy UI for simple interactions wouldn't make it past many engineering managers or PMs. But when there's needlessly a full second lag after pressing a button on a web app everyone shrugs, inaccurately blames it on the web platform (instead of piss poor engineering), and it's out to production furthering the stereotype that web apps are inherently jank.
As a web development community we need to stop this cycle. Web engineers need to stop building, and engineering managers need to stop approving, web apps with needlessly janky, laggy UI for even rudimentary interactions.
This 2014 recap [2] of a comScore report notes that more than half of all smartphone users download 0 new apps a month -- this started the catchphrase that "the average user downloads 0 new apps a month", which has both been supported and challenged by additional analyses on old and new data every year since. Whether it's 0 or 1.5 [3] isn't the point -- the growth is measly.
Aside from a select runaway hits, most of today's most used apps are the same as 4, 5 years ago. The app boom has been over for a long time. Occasionally, one can still strike it rich, but it's the exception, and not the norm.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/02/19/exclusive-...
[2] https://www.quora.com/How-was-WhatsApp-built
[3] https://www.tune.com/blog/no-the-average-american-does-not-d...
Even those that are, they can access the full spectrum of OS APIs, instead of a document model bended to be a VM.
Yup. I've been reading about the imminent demise of native apps forever, but even Steve Jobs couldn't sell that vision. Web apps on mobile are the way of the future, and always will be.