On How the Web is More Than Enough

Loved this post by Paul Ford about how good the Web is as an app platform:

My quirky 1990s-vintage office suite might not convince you—it’s weird and small. So take a look at Simon Willison’s new web-based browser 3D game, Battle Drones. He’s hosting it on GitHub. He wrote it himself. He’s not a games builder. It just pops right up in the browser and you play it. It’s multiplayer, and it works offline.

It’s a bit hard to believe that a game like Battle Drones is capable of running completely within the browser. I guess in theory it was always possible: JavaScript is Turing complete after all. But it would’ve been a huge pain to get it working well. It would’ve taken an entire team (see the point about why web tech can be so complicated). Now with agents, that complexity can be brought to heal by an individual.

This also destabilizes the app store economy. The high tax of building for app stores seems less worth paying when you can just test an idea in the world from a web server for $0 after a couple weeks.

I do wonder. Despite how capable web apps could be, there is a lot to like about native apps: I wouldn’t be ditching my Apple shares just yet. But I guess it would make one question why they would go through the review process if it was possible to use the web for something. And it’s possible to do quite a lot, without having to get someones approval.

Anyway, great post.