[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.