[nayuki]

Great article reflecting on who controls computational resources - the user or the company.

I want to respond to one point mentioned:

> Those who continue to do significant work offline will become the exception; meaning they will be an electoral minority. With so much effort being put into web apps, they may even be seen as eccentrics; meaning there may not be much sympathy for their needs in the halls of power.

What I find scary is that developers see web apps (and hence the open web platform) as no longer fashionable, and instead focus on developing mobile apps (iOS and Android).

There are various services that are only available to mobile users, not PC / web browser users. One I can recall off the top of my head is Snapchat a decade ago. Other examples today include various bike sharing apps, and possibly some banking apps too. Often, the web app and mobile app don't reach feature parity. Often, the company pushes people to download the mobile app and discourages visiting the website (e.g. Reddit).

[rbanffy]

> What I find scary is that developers see web apps (and hence the open web platform) as no longer fashionable, and instead focus on developing mobile apps (iOS and Android).

Few of those apps are standalone mobile apps. More frequently than not, the mobile app is a thin layer on top of the mobile app.

[privong]

> What I find scary is that developers see web apps (and hence the open web platform) as no longer fashionable, and instead focus on developing mobile apps (iOS and Android).

Based on my reading of the original article, I think your response here might be a bit tangential to the point about offline work? Web apps and mobile apps are both in practice largely the same in terms of who controls the computing resources -- they generally only work by speaking to the remote servers of the company.

But in detail, mobile apps seem like they would have a slight edge for promoting offline work. While they in practice "phone home" (or even store data remotely), they could in principle be written without needing to contact external servers and in a way that all data is stored locally.

I do agree that apps often attempt to silo users and can do this more effectively than webapps, but as used now, both are mostly online tools and so don't really address the question of tools that are usable offline.