And what open file system is there for "web apps"? Dropbox and a cobbled together flash uploader / email attachment / webapp specific API which probably only goes to FaceBook?Playing Devil's advocate, Google Drive has an API for webapps to access the user's files (with permissions only to files created by the app itself or that the user specifically opens). The webapp chooses the MIMEtypes it can open and then the user can just do Open With → App.
Sure, it's GDrive specific for now, but the API is fairly generic and if it's successful, I can see other online drives implementing it themselves. Well, assuming Oracle loses this lawsuit, I guess :)
Aren't webapps isolated? Funneled through a strict paradigm? And also at the other end of a comparatively slow link?
APIs de-isolate them. Both the proprietary ones that already exist and open, distributed ones like http://webintents.org/
And besides, aren't native apps on mobile isolated too?
And the link between the user and the app may be slow, but it only needs to carry the UI. The data will flow from "cloud to cloud" at very high speed.
We can't head to a future of everything we do in one portable device and from there to ubiquitous life integration when every app can read all your data and send it to anyone for any purpose, Android is falling fowl of that right now, we have to have isolation and sandboxing, different trust levels, restricted access to more important data (contacts, for example), to make a solid and trustable future platform.
Uh, Android does have sandboxing and isolation, and apps can only access your data if you specifically allow them to. iOS was the one which didn't require permission to access your contacts (though Apple has said it will).
