Plus it looked like Web Apps were gonna become huge.
I know the words “web app” send some on Lemmy into a frenzied rage, but they’d be amazing from a platform agnostic perspective.
Imagine if the biggest barrier to entry for new smartphone OSes (app support) was gone. It’d be huge.
But seeing it as a threat to their business models (don’t get that 30% cut if it’s not through the App/Play stores), Apple and Google have had pretty shitty support for them.
If a Linux phone was out today and had good hardware and software, it’d still fail just like Windows Phone and BlackBerry OS did. WebApps would give it a strong chance though.
Agreed. I’d like to add that web apps are much better today than they were 10 years ago. We have notification support, touch support, etc. A well-made progressive web app is basically the same as a native app now — or it would be with halfway-decent OS support, anyway.
The fact is, a ton of common apps are just web wrappers anyway, even on desktop. Like Discord, Slack, and Steam. Even Outlook is moving in that direction.
