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Comment by CharlesW | Hacker News Reader

> Those company lose money because of good standards.

They absolutely do not, and they often make money and realize many other benefits by leveraging and/or contributing to standards.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

https://www.fastcompany.com/3044088/apple-and-usb-a-history-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime_File_Format#Extensio...

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WASM and the further development of API's like WebGL are a dangerous threat to their app store revenue, so both Apple and Google are incentivized to lead (or sometimes stall) development.

> WASM and the further development of API's like WebGL are a dangerous threat to their app store revenue…

I'm not sure how you arrive at "web technologies are a dangerous threat to app store revenue", given that the iPhone was introduced with the best web browser ever made for mobile, and predated the app store by more than a year. Care to elaborate?

Sure, Fortnite is a great example. If it can well run via web (which is a current workaround via Xbox Cloud Gaming), Apple can’t take their 30% cut. Same with Roblox and other games. Top paid apps like Procreate could do the same.

Apple and Google could lose tens of billions in revenue if they make the web too good too fast.

Yeah Fortnite could run well in WebAssembly and WebGPU for example, cloud streaming isn't necessary to get Fortnite on the mobile web.

My team is actually developing a suite of tools and platform to enable Unreal Engine game developers to deploy their games to HTML5, bypassing walled gardens and 30% fees entirely.

> My team is actually developing a suite of tools and platform to enable Unreal Engine game developers to deploy their games to HTML5, bypassing walled gardens and 30% fees entirely.

Okay, so your POV makes more sense now. I'm a fan of the web, so I wish you the best in making the web a platform for non-casual gaming.

IMHO, if you view this primarily as a technology problem, you're going to learn that it isn't. Even when the technology prerequisites exist (Safari supports both Wasm and WebGL today), someone will need to solve the problems that app stores solve.

Great points. And regarding it not being a technology problem, you're referring to the obstacle of getting users to go to the web as a platform for discovering software, rather than the App Store or Google Play, right?

Not the poster you are asking this question of... but yes, that was true 15 years ago.

However these days, app stores have proven their massive profitability, so web tech on par with native apps threatens that income stream.

Offering reasonable functionality via web can be a huge win for certain app categories (anything with IAP or subscription) because it is easier to offer payment options that bypass app stores and their mandatory revenue slice.

> However these days, app stores have proven their massive profitability, so web tech on par with native apps threatens that income stream.

Does it? Of the millions of apps in the Apple and Google app stores, can you list a few that were pulled in favor of web-only distribution once web APIs made a web app possible?

https://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/

> "contributing to" standards

ftfy

The gp post did say "good standards," so I'm assuming that means open, unbiased ones.

> ftfy

I think the double quotes are meant to suggest that all open source contributions by Google and Apple are bad, somehow?

I love the idea of "unbiased" though, as if contributors to standards must have no opinions about the standard one way or the other in order to be "pure".

Yep. Good standards = healthy competition in the space. Standards that basically just standardize what someone has already done, standards that require special licensing, require a high degree of effort to implement, etc, all create competitive advantages for large incumbents.

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