Citation needed.
20 years ago you could make a commercial app with a GUI in no time with things like Delphi or Visual Basic.
Now to do the same we have to learn several standards and languages and libs/frameworks and build tools and server admin tools and...
As you say it's still not trivial (legacy browsers, funny standards, technical challenges of serving loads of users etc.) but Id argue it is substantially easier than the challenges involved in making a program written in visual basic available to billions of people.
And publishers were readily available too, like for any other physical item.
If something was wanted, it did not matter, it would sell and distribute itself. Take a look at things like Lotus, Office, Windows, Doom...
At the same time, I absolutely think it's the online distribution of webapps that is the killer feature. People only need a URL. There's no download and install process (and the less tech-literate users often had difficulties with that), and perhaps even more importantly, there's no patching. As a developer, you know that all your users are running the latest version you got deployed. You don't have version 1.0, 1.01 and 1.12 floating around the Web as downloads, you don't have to beg people to download and install the patches, you just deploy to the production server and that's an automatic update for everyone.
That is IMO why browsers won as an application platform. In my very limited experience coding for the web, it's a remarkably bad application platform. You don't have many useful primitives. You don't really have a choice of language. You're beating protocols meant for documents into submission so they become useful for apps. It's more difficult to create a UI than it was in Visual Basic, Delphi or Borland C++, and so on. But for all of that, you get an application that someone can start using after clicking one link, and that will transparently auto-update.
Browsers have "won" for other reasons: licensing control, unavoidable analytics, subscription mechanics... All that combined is a dream for a publisher.
> With Stores those points are solved. Prominent ones like Valve, Apple, Google, Microsoft etc...
didn't exist 20 years ago...
> Browsers have "won" for other reasons: licensing control, unavoidable analytics, subscription mechanics...
And those stores (and the native app platforms they reinforce) is what allows all these things in native apps, and makes them quite a bit harder to block than in web apps.
So what? I haven't said anything about that.
As a data point, Steam (as a store) was already there 15 years ago.
> And those stores (..) is what allows all these things in native apps
Stores don't change what a native application can or cannot do.
If the old native apps were the gold standard, modern distribution wasn't part of that. If we include modern distribution, then all the supposed advantages you cite for browsers "winning" apply just as well to native apps. And yet.
> Stores don't change what a native application can or cannot do.
and yet all those stores provide licensing control (and DRM), analytics, and subscription mechanics, often unavoidably (Apple) or unavoidably in practice (Google and until very recently, Steam).