I never heard of this. Like, never even in passing have I seen that bounty mentioned. One of the trivial apps that was demoed literally years ago was a simple tic-tac-toe app, and there is even a MUD written for Urbit, so saying it's impossible to write apps for it isn't true. The web server is hosted in Urbit, along with the developer chat room. And really, the problem isn't that apps are impossible to write but that they would be easier to write using a different platform, which is probably true (for strip poker at least), since you don't need anything more complex than a couple hundred lines of C.

> I'm confused. Is this just saying that Urbit supposed to replace my Windows desktop and all the cloud services I use?

You'd run an Urbit instance (a planet) in the cloud (ideally, on three separate machines where a disk write succeeds if two out of three nodes receive it) and then run sub-instances (moons) on each of your personal computing devices (computers, phone, tablets). You could then interact with your planet and/or moons from your browser.

You'd do this because you want to run cloud-type services like photo sharing and (micro)blogging and such, but you _also_ want to do so through your own UI, not UI controlled by someone else whose interests are disaligned with yours, like Mark Zuckerberg's.

I can't imagine it'd replace standard OSs like Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android.

> Also, what does "Urbit's formal semantics makes ships trivial to migrate" mean?

If you want to move a ship (a directory containing your planet's data) from one (cloud?) computer to another, all you need to do is shut it down, scp it to the new location, and then start it back up again.