Mobile is the new PC and AArch64 is the new x64

[Joakim]

On Tuesday, 18 September 2018 at 18:06:37 UTC, Neia Neutuladh 
wrote:
> On Tuesday, 18 September 2018 at 07:53:31 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> On Monday, 17 September 2018 at 22:27:41 UTC, Neia Neutuladh 
>> wrote:
>>> On Monday, 17 September 2018 at 15:47:14 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>>>> Not sure why that matters if you agree with Kay that HTML is 
>>>> an abortion? :) I actually think it's great that mobile is 
>>>> killing off the web, as the Comscore usage stats I linked 
>>>> earlier show.
>>>
>>> HTML is a somewhat open standard. I'm more happy with HTML 
>>> and Javascript, as ugly as they are and as dominated by 
>>> Google and Microsoft as they are, than having to target 
>>> private companies' frameworks.
>>
>> So you'd rather target an incredibly badly designed open 
>> standard than a mostly open source "private company's" 
>> framework that's certainly not great, but much better? It's no 
>> contest for me, give me the latter any day. And then of 
>> course, there's always cross-platform OSS toolkits like 
>> Flutter or DlangUI.
>
> Thinking about it a bit more, the openness of the platform is 
> more important. Android and iOS are effectively closed 
> platforms. You *can* sideload apps, but it's rare to find 
> someone willing to do so. If you're not on the app stores, your 
> app isn't going to get a thousandth as much traction.

I'll note that you wrote "app stores," and for Android there are 
actually multiple. There's the official Play store from google, 
the Amazon appstore, app stores for OSS apps like F-Droid or 
Fossdroid, and over 400 app stores in China, where those first 
two app stores are almost never used:

https://www.appinchina.co/market/app-stores/

Anyone can install any app store on their Android device and get 
any apps they want, though as you note, most outside China just 
go with the pre-installed Play or Amazon store.

> Windows, on the other hand, has long been an open platform; you 
> can develop for it and publish your programs and Microsoft 
> won't get in the way.

Though that is now changing with their new UWP platform, which by 
default must be installed from their own app store, the Microsoft 
Store. The link for the Windows/AArch64 device in my original 
post notes that they expect most Windows/AArch64 apps to be UWP 
apps, and so you'd get them from an app store just like Android 
most of the time. I read that they do have similar allowances for 
side-loading UWP apps as Android though, and of course older 
win32/64 apps on normal Wintel devices isn't affected by this.

> So an open source cross-platform toolkit controlled by a single 
> entity isn't bad. I use GTK+ a lot, for instance. But the web 
> and HTML is a better situation than Android and iOS and their 
> toolkits.

I don't think the app stores are that big a deal as long as 
side-loading and multiple app stores are always allowed. Of 
course, that's not the case on iOS, one of the many reasons I've 
never really used an iOS device.