[TuringTest]

But how do you deploy VMs to the tightly controlled environment of mobile devices?

The good thing of web development today is that you can deploy the client side of any application to any smartphone, since all of them have been built with strong web browser support - and the browser is a fairly complete platform, with mayor browser being available and relatively compatible in all mobile and desktop systems. I don't know of any VM that shares those qualities.

[wruza]

As ARM-VPS are available, proper vitualization does work on both x86 and arm. It means that VT can be implemented on mobile (not sure for somewhat custom iphone chips though). The fact that it isn't yet implemented is no stopper. If all three mobile OSes said "there is your industrial-grade isolated vm, do anything you want and note the time/battery/memory restrictions" then problem would be solved. It should not even be that complex as real "virtualbox", because we don't need to emulate an entire PC, only ui-related parts of it.

>how do you deploy VM

Clone OS-provided vm, put binary into its address space from cache and/or network, run. It connects to host system and other vms via sockets/shm and does its job, sharing real hardware in host-defined, predictable way. Virtual private servers do that everyday.

Edit: interesting link I found searching for arm virtualization: https://gizmodo.com/5890453/can-vmware-put-a-virtual-machine...

[TuringTest]

> If all three mobile OSes said "there is your industrial-grade isolated vm, do anything you want and note the time/battery/memory restrictions" then problem would be solved

Yes, well, being theoretically possible is not the same as being viable and having solved the chicken-and-egg problem. I think webasm has nowadays more possibilities to become adopted as the standard for a common platform.

[wruza]

It is most probable outcome indeed.