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0 pointsabiox10y ago0 comments

> Android/iOS/OSX/Windows should just work on a better standard mechanism to deliver native apps instead

one might imagine that after these competing and incompatible native apps become a headache for crossplatform pursuits, a new platform will emerge that provides a uniform toolset for developing (mostly) native-platform independent applications.

perhaps this toolset will utilize a declarative system for specifying the user interface, and a scripting system that is JIT'd on each platform.

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6 comments · 4 top-level

arcticfox10y ago· 2 in thread

Magic! We could even have standardized links between the apps, and companies that specialize in finding content no matter what app it's in.

I think you're on to something...it could be huge... Heh.

TeMPOraL10y ago

> I think you're on to something...it could be huge... Heh.

Could be. Sad that it isn't. Think how awesome it would be if app developers actually cared about interoperability instead of trying to grab the whole pie for themselves while giving you a hefty dose of ads in return. This is mostly the fault of developers, but the platform itself could help a lot if it was more end-user programmable. You'd have at least a chance to force different apps to talk to each other.

bendbro10y ago

He's being sarcastic. Links are literal web links and the Company he's referring to is Google.

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sievebrain10y ago

Android has declarative UI, JIT compiled app logic and a way to link apps together (via intents). It is definitely not the web though.

I think people confuse ideas with implementations. The web is a pretty reasonable implementation of the idea "let's build a hypertext platform". It is not at all a reasonable implementation of the idea "let's build an app platform" which is why in the markets where reasonable distribution platforms exist (mobile) HTML5 got its ass kicked by professionally designed platforms like iOS and Android.

Razengan10y ago

Well, why do native apps for all the popular websites exist? Surely nobody would need or download the FB/Twitter/Reddit/etc. apps on mobile or desktop if the website itself was the optimum experience...

My point is that even with the web the developers are still going to make the native clients, so either the web has to become good enough for the need for native apps to disappear eventually, and the browser becomes the OS, or native apps become convenient enough to completely replace webapps.

Of course if the browser becomes the OS then the end result would be the same as the suggestion in my original post.

niutech10y ago

There is one such platform called Haxe (http://haxe.org)

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