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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

I think our best bet to end the duopoly of Apple and Google is to have a cross-platform language that runs on all platforms (iOS, Android, and perhaps the web).

The reason is that there will otherwise be important apps that never end on anything other than Apple or Google OSes, like (for example) bank applications, government apps (for taxes, alerts, covid tracking), perhaps things like netflix or perhaps the BBC news app.

Also, why would developers spend time developing for an open platform, when they can make 10X the amount of money on the closed platforms?

So effectively, we need the spirit of the web, but in the app stores.

(I know, this sounds a bit like embrace, extend and extinguish; but this time it's from the "good" side :)

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To end their monopoly governments could just make their business model illegal - that is giving something for "free" and then spying on users and showing them ads aka brainwashing or making sure devices cannot be repaired only discarded.

I think WebAssembly will (eventually) be that language. Write in any language, but compile to one target that runs on any device.

The bigger challenge is the integration with the host OS - we need a common set of OS calls that can be made available to applications running in WebAssembly (eg, WASI).

WASI is the tip of the iceberg for a UI application; its scope doesn’t extend outside of the kind of things you can access with your friendly neighborhood libc.

This sounds a bit underwhelming but I think web apps (in the system browser), Electron and Cordova are as far as we'll get in that direction. (If you exclude projects that are technically more "elegant" but never used in the wild.)

What about React Native?

One of the problems with React Native is that it tries to have a common abstraction over two pretty different platforms.

In some areas it succeeded e.g. form controls in other it's pretty poor e.g. navigation.

Also, such abstraction is probably difficult to port existing applications to. And there could be a mismatch with some applications (games?) that simply want lower level abstractions.

Right, there's a handful of cross-platform toolkits that are in widespread use as well. There's still a difference to full-on web apps though, in that web apps might run on platforms the developers never intended them to run on. The API is independent of the underlying system which means that any platform can implement a runtime environment (browser) and execute web apps without recompilation (kinda like Java but Java is barely used like that anymore).

Arguably this doesn't hold true for Electron/Cordova, so RN is probably comparable to that.

> Also, why would developers spend time developing for an open platform, when they can make 10X the amount of money on the closed platforms?

Yet, GNU/Linux distros exist with a ton of FOSS software.

Yes, but this time it's "free competing with free", or almost-free (or paid for by your personal data, which sadly for most people is equivalent to free).

The power of the web is that it’s accessible from ANY platform and there’s already an app to use it which comes preloaded with whichever platform you’re in: the browser.

That said, native app performance is still unmatched (but not by a long shot!) the react-native project (both by FB and MSFT) looks promising.

There's also Flutter, interestingly by Google (not sure what their strategy is here, as their main interest should be to keep the world's information indexable which becomes difficult when people use more native apps as opposed to the web).

They are already able to index mobile apps fine though.

I think the answer is actually what you mentioned - mobile browsing.

I think we should stick to our guns and make linux a platform.

It's actually surprising that a lot of companies actually have linux apps. There is a microsoft teams for linux for example.

Flutter+Dart is a good choice for this because they already have a goal of supporting 5 platforms with a single codebase: Android, iOS, Web, Windows, Linux and MacOS.

Flutter+Dart is a bad choice for this because both projects are managed & funded by Google.

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