alt Hacker NewsOT: Why is that Alphabet, Mozilla, Apple, etc can get together to create web standards that allow anyone to create software that works cross-platform - only a browser is needed, but Microsoft, Alphabet, Apple, Canonical, etc can't get together to create standards that allow anyone to create software that works cross-platform?
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Apple make money from the App Store and from selling their hardware, so why should they want to invest on something that let people install software bypassing the App Store or that works on other platforms?
Alphabet make money from ads, so they want web pages, apps on Android and Chrome everywhere.
Mozilla make money from Google.
Microsoft make money from software licenses and subscriptions and from cloud services. They might be interested in cross platform installation.
At the moment what we have is PWA and WASM and icons on the desktop.
There are many projects that try to make cross-platform mobile apps easier, including Google's own Flutter. I haven't heard of them getting much cooperation from the teams working on Android or iOS, though.
At least for stuff that doesn't use device API's much, it seems like websites are the way to go. They're a whole lot easier to build than mobile apps.
The API surface becomes the lowest common denominator of all the platforms it supports, possibly with a path to support platform-native features, but probably in a way that’s necessarily not as good as native.
I think we already have plenty of avenue in ‘solutions’ like Electron to let people build bad apps.
Ah, I'm always up for a tangent.
The boring answer from Capt. Obvious. Incentive alignment.
That said, WebAssembly might be the trojan horse. While it started as a browser compile target, WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) is extending it beyond browsers into filesystem, networking, etc. etc. etc.
Fingers crossed, we may get cross-platform standards by accident.
Given you have two of the same names on both sides of the list, it looks like your question is self-contradictory. Could you clarify?
Apple ain't getting their 30% when you're running shit in your browser.
Simple. It is not in their interest to do this. It is a lot of work, for no revenue.
You answered the question yourself: There is already a standard that allows anyone to create software that works cross-platform: the browser.