No less than Web creator Tim Berners-Lee has argued that the app store model is fracturing the Internet and that developers should write programs for browsers instead.
But USENIX panelists said it’s all about cash. For better or worse, the app store model is favored by developers because it lets them make money.
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The app store model does have problems. Apps don’t necessarily work across Android, Apple’s iOS and other platforms, and when you switch from one device to another you have to re-download applications and hope they work the same as they did before.
Whether to build for the app store or the Web was called “the mother of all questions” by Chanezon. On the non-mobile side, Chanezon pitched the Chrome Web Store as a platform for monetizing applications that run in browsers.
Right now, at least, native applications on mobile devices are better than websites from both a technology and economics standpoint, Ying said.
“What’s wrong with browsers today is they are not specifically optimized for building those application experiences that you see in a mobile device,” Ying said. Those limitations can be hidden on the desktop because of its processing power, but become apparent on phones and tablets.
“On an iPad or iPhone or Android device you really need to think about your abstractions, touch responsiveness, animation speed, all those things matter. Abstractions matter on a mobile device,” Ying said.
Panelists and audience members discussed how the technology world has shifted back and forth between a Web model and a client-server model, with the Web model actually resembling the 1960s mainframe environment in which logic is built on the server side and clients don’t have to do much work.
The rise of Web applications that look more like native apps and require a powerful Web client is in a way a return to the client-server architecture, Google’s Chanezon said.
Microsoft’s Meijer, of course, told Chanezon that “I’m really happy you’re going back to the client-server architecture.”
“Having these Web applications was always a bad idea,” Meijer said. “It’s crazy to generate your UI on the server side and project it onto the client. That’s not how things work. When it comes to technology I am really conservative and like to have simple things.”
Even Google, whose executives proclaim a “100% Web” future, is conflicted internally on what technologies will bring that future into being.
Chanezon noted that the recent Google I/O conference saw his company pitching a future based on Android one day, and Chrome the next.
“I think the jury is still out on which version will win, and frankly I don’t know,” Chanezon said, with Maximilien concluding: “So even at Google, the house is divided.”
