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Comment by solomatov | Hacker News Reader

We already have run-anywhere applications. They are called web applications. I don't see how Apple might improve something here. I can start creating email in GMail on iPhone and continue to edit it on PC and many other web apps have similar functionality.

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Apple's improvement is in reducing the friction. When the devices are in proximity you literally swipe the icon and are instantly in exactly the same state you left off — on a different device. Web apps don't do it like this, and I think that's an important aspect of the attraction here.

>When the devices are in proximity you literally swipe the icon and are instantly in exactly the same state you left off — on a different device. Web apps don't do it like this, and I think that's an important aspect of the attraction here.

Web applications DO this. Take a look at google docs. Thanks to technologies such as operational transformation, this is possible.

Chrome doesn't even work like that. Web apps can do it, but it's a huge pain in the ass. It looks like apple's going to make the transition a lot easier.

I am not familiar with any web apps (Google docs included) that put an icon on the lock screen of a device within proximity that you can swipe to be instantly at your editing position ready to continue. This is what I refer to when I say "reducing friction".

It's not the problem with web apps, it's a problem with Apple who doesn't provide such an API. Chrome and Safari has notification API and it can be implemented in a way to support this.

I didn't say web apps can't do this — just that they currently do not do this. Certainly not in the way I saw handoff working at WWDC.

It sounds like a neat trick, but I'm having a really hard time thinking of when I'd actually want or need to do this. If I'm already near my desktop or laptop, I'm unlikely to start composing an email on my phone and suddenly decide I want to continue it on another device. So I'm not sure what friction they are reducing.

Most common I can think of is when I want to read a web page on something bigger than my iPhone. Currently I have to email myself a link, and I lose my scroll position.

Just noting that if you use Safari you can use iCloud tabs to load pages from other devices. I believe Chrome is similar in this regard. Handoff just reduces the friction in even this process, so you don't even need to specify which page to pick up reading on.

iCloud tab syncing has a pretty bad lag. Maybe a minute to update on my Mac. Fine most of the time, but annoying if you want to do a Handoff-style scenario. It also doesn't show your current iPhone "tab" highlighted in any way, which is odd.

So, I'm glad Apple saw it as something to improve.

The author makes the leap from "data is live-synced between multiple running applications" to "applications that can run on multiple devices simultaneously" erroneously (or, to make a different point). They're quite distinct technologies that are not mutually dependent on eachother. In fact, this tech could be applied to web applications to also interoperate.

Web applications are run-anywhere, but are not live-synced. Google Docs are, but not web applications as a whole.

I cover this in my blog post. Web application are run-anywhere, but lack the performance and low-level integration of native applications.

Which raises the question: how much of that better-than-web performance of native applications is due to not having to deal with networking which, by the nature of this 'advance', they will now have to deal with?

When performance is needed, you can use asm.js, webGL, HTML5 video/audio APIs, and in the future other APIs. It's very hard for me to imagine consumer applications, which can't be implemented as web.

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