> likely to be developed (in the past and in the future)
The past already happened unless the author invents time travel it's impossible for more applications to "likely to be developed" "in the past".
> Why would you deal with all the angst of writing a billing system
I could not agree more, use PayPal and a shopping cart that supports it.
> why would you maintain servers, deal with hairy scalability issues
What kind of scalability issues?
> deal with the craptastic reality of Internet Explorer,
I don't know, let me see why I develop for IE... ohh yes, because it means that my app is accessible to IE users!
btw: looks like the author remembered that IE actually exists, see previous comment.
> why would you do all this if you can just plug into the App Store and let it handle all the headaches?
Three reasons: 1) I need to learn Objective-C and iOS APIs 2) it means a lot less users than the IE users 3) I don't want to give away 30% of my earnings to Apple
> Sure, for some apps, it will still make sense to be on the web, or even to be only or mostly on the web. But for many, the web is a shortcut to avoid the problems of piracy and distribution.
I really like paragraphs where "some" and "many" many are used to give a sense of scale without presenting facts.
The web is not a shortcut to avoid piracy problems, it wouldn't work for games.
> It’s a lot simpler to build an iOS/MacOS app and distribute it through the App Store than to run web servers and keep them up to date and build billing systems and maintain mailing lists and so on2.
It's a lot smaller user base too.
> To put a final nail in the web-coffin, a lot of web developers have already gotten acquainted with the fundamental tools for building Mac OS apps while building their iOS satellite apps. It’ll be an easy transition for them to build their next app solely in the Mac ecosystem and avoid all the headaches of the web world.
Once you earn 1000$ it's easy transition to 200$.