Ask HN: Why is there no major push towards Android for Servers and Desktops?
You should check the app sizes on Android - I&#x27;ve got very few under 100MB and that&#x27;s exactly because they ship all the needed dependencies with them. That&#x27;s how you avoid the issues during upgrades both on the phones and servers.<p>The phone apps don&#x27;t use the exact same system for it, but essentially they&#x27;re fully isolated in a similar way containers would be. The only difference is what is provided by the system and what by the app.<p>Flatpak can also shift the GUI into the base layer, so for example on Fedora Silverlight you can have a barebones system which uses a shared gui layer for most installed apps. (CoreOS is a similar idea, but for the server side)<p>&gt; It&#x27;s not hard to imagine extending that model to cover things like databases<p>Databases are not interchangeable beyond trivial examples. But a plugin system like that exists - odbc.<p>&gt; when the app can just say &quot;Hey, I need to make a database, I can use ...<p>This can be already solved with either full system configuration (Nixos) or containers (docker-compose does pretty much that). Those are sane and structured as well and they&#x27;re available now.<p>If you want to go one layer higher (lower?), you can build a similar environment with AWS cloudformation - they can provide you with app containers or isolated functions, ready databases, all the connections in between.<p>&gt;  Apps use things far slower than Dart and Kotlin and Android API calls all the time.<p>Yes, but on the phone your app may just take slightly longer. On the server side a common case taking longer means everyone else waiting a bit longer and the whole thing translates to more money spent on infra. Those are different failure cases &#x2F; requirements.<p>&gt; Why are we not managing our web apps by uploading a single APK file and a settings.ini with the permissions we want to give it?<p>Many of us are doing basically that. The APKs are container images &#x2F; static binaries &#x2F; other kind of packages though. My whole server is one Nixos configuration file for many services and packages for example. Some older systems won&#x27;t change overnight, but for new stuff you have all the possibilities you want, available right now.<p>Probably the closest to &quot;just put some blocks together&quot; you can get now are the iot fleet management services OSes like balena and others.