| > 1) .... why? ... You're already scratching the surface: vertical integration, backdoors and high prices, power and battery life optimization, lesser effort for an app developer to publish to all platforms, develop-once-run-everywhere, ... Looks like you're looking for one "The Reason" - but there doesn't need to be one. If a layperson like you or me is able to provide 5-10 reasons, then its likely there could be 100-1000 reasons internally, and all of them add up. > 2) iOS apps on OS X. Why? Does anybody want this? Of course yes. As an app developer and as a consumer - convergence and bringing my apps and data across all platforms is no longer an "optional" thing anymore, its mandatory even for a ToDo list app, or email, or IM and everything else. Web apps suck at power efficiency - see the situation with Slack/Electron/Chrome/others on desktop, especially when it comes to stuff like hardware bound work (video/audio, digital image and movie processing, hidpi wor and much more). If you don't need all this, and all you need is just a chromebook with a browser, its fine, it has and will keep working. It also ties in to why you're confused "why this is required" in so many ways. You may not be the target audience here. > 3) Given the hellscape of bugs currently present in iOS/macOS, does anybody have faith that Apple is going to be able to navigate a rewrite of macOS on this scale? This one answers itself. If a fragmented platform doesn't work and has lots of bugs - then it makes all the more sense to invest all resources in one platform/arch to have better focus and lesser bugs to tackle. Everyone doing rewrites know that there will be short-term pains, but that has to be balanced with the larger picture - otherwise we'll just keep hating new releases but there will be no solutions other than "let's do only bug fixes for next 1-2 years" aka platform stagnation, and users still won't be happy :) |
On 2)... I hate web apps. Probably much more than your average layperson. Electron is miserable in my experience -- laggy, high memory/CPU user, non-native feel, but I think a web app in a browser is OK. There are really two different use cases I see here. a) Take TurboTax, for instance. I don't want to download a TurboTax app for my computer. I'd only use it once or twice a year. But it works well in a browser. It's complex enough that a web app is justified. b) Spotify. It needs to interact with local files, and I usually have it up in the background. A web app doesn't work well for this. Unfortunately Electron doesn't work well for this either.
I think if this is executed well it could be amazing -- what if layouts scale beautifully onto a laptop screen, so I can use an iOS app instead of an Electron app for Spotify/Slack/etc? If this happened, the benefits could trickle down into iOS, making it a more useful platform. On the other hand, layouts might not scale well for larger screens, and iOS apps on macOS could end up neutered and even less useless than a current webapp. Hopefully the former case happens, but lately Apple makes me feel like the latter is more likely.
3) I'm not really convinced that this will reduce bugs. In my experience, combining two pieces of software into one just makes the resulting monolith harder to reason about because it doubles complexity at high levels and increases complexity exponentially at low levels. But maybe that says something about my development skills :)