(2021-09-18) Brander The State Of The Web

Gordon Brander: The state of the web. What’s next for the web? I’ve spent a good chunk of my career trying to answer this question in practice, making the web do things it maybe shouldn’t… stuff like mobile operating systems, and VR. Follow-up to (2021-09-10) Brander Why Did The Web Take Over Desktop And Not Mobile.

Technologies develop along an s-curve, and are adopted along an s-curve.

This gives late-stage ecosystems a characteristic flavor: Attitudes shift from positive-sum to zero-sum, reflecting the end of growth.

Consolidated systems are fragile, so late-stage ecosystems are prone to collapse. But something more interesting often happens instead…

Something with an asymmetric survival strategy enters the scene. It makes a radically different set of tradeoffs.

To the extent that the web has been difficult to kill, it is because it is evolvable

It keeps finding new fits, and changing its basis of competition.

There are a lot of webview apps out there. Web performance isn’t great, but it is good enough. This is mostly the result of hardware getting faster.

Bootstrapping a multiplayer experience on the web is as easy as sharing a link.

What about mobile? My sense is that the challenge here is not performance, or capabilities, but payments. One-tap app IAP, subscriptions, and app purchases are crucial to the mobile metabolism.

However, the ground is shifting here too. Native App Stores are themselves past the early rapid growth phase

App stores basically have carrying capacity for 80% cow clickers and 20% everything else.

Plot twist: WebAssembly metaplatforms

The web is open-ended, and continues to produce plot twists. WebAssembly is one of these. It is a universal bytecode runtime, designed to run fast low-level code in a sandbox

Enter WebAssembly. It offers a path to compiling native apps, written in languages like Rust or C++, into binaries that can run either natively or on the web

One more plot twist: WebAssembly apps can be run in the cloud, too. (Personal Cloud)

Metaplatforms like React Native, and Flutter are harbingers, but I suspect we’ll see the emergence of integrated game engines for apps. Think Unity or Unreal Engine.

If we can do this with existing game engines, it seems a matter of time before we get engines dedicated to everyday apps, rather than games.

The browser has historically been a thick platform for thin apps

This shift in power from platforms to frameworks would be bad for app stores, bad for the open html web, and great for developers

What if we built an open source game engine for apps?

I think the most likely candidate for an open source engine for apps is the engine being developed by Rik Arends and Eddie Bruel for Makepad editor. It is spectacularly smooth and fast.