People are reading into moving to native apps for each OS for an email app as a move away from Rails or that Rails is dead. The hot-take headline could be "Web applications are dead!" Rails, Django, Laravel, HTMLX, every one of them is in the same spot Rails is in.

We as an industry have been abusing HTTP and HTML for 2+ decades now by building web apps that were traditionally installed client/server applications or standalone client applications. There was a time in the industry that managing all the OS versions, patches, etc. was extremely labor intensive, hence the move to the web. If the cost of building native apps is near zero, in comparison to before AI, then how many web applications are better suited to client/server apps?

Take everyone's favorite app (sarcasm) - ticket tracking for IT or software work. Back in the day (late 90's) this was an installed app, the UI was extremely responsive and restrictive. People building native apps in Visual Basic didn't have to deal with HTML, CSS, and all the trade-offs of a markup language for an application, they had modules/components they could build for UIs. There wasn't weird DOM hierarchies, a data transform to text, send it over HTTP with auth, protect the web server that is open to anyone on the planet to hack, transform from text to data types, save to a database. The native app had a database driver in it or nearby and you did SQL from the app to your database server.

We can containerize application runtimes now. Look at what 37signals did with ONCE as an example, yes they are Rails apps but they could be anything that reduces IT install time compared to the '90s.

My takeaway from that keynote (watched the whole thing) is we need to re-think everything in software: process, tech stacks, architecture, etc. as the industry moves forward. AI has advanced a lot in what it can do in the last 10 months, it might plateau at some point and become another usable tool, but what it opens up is the ability to do things differently because the cost of creating (and throwing away crap output and re-creating) is very cheap.

The web as an application delivery model is very complicated compared to building small native apps. If your average Joe or Jane is going to be creating apps, I would think the thing to reach for is not web.