Catching Native Apps
The best part of this article is this comment from Plume:> This has always been wrong, because it completely discounts the advantages of the web. Cross-platform compatibility makes an app greater. No installation makes an app better. Simple collaboration and sharing with anyone, including people on weird devices like Chromebooks, makes an app greater. Automatic updating makes an app greater. Being able to open the app I normally use on my desktop on my phone in a pinch makes an app greater. Not locking me into using a Mac makes an app greater.I'm all-in on the Apple ecosystem, but collaboration and universal access on all platforms and automatic updates are considered table stakes for growth-focused products (edit: most products that normal people care about) these days. The cost-benefit analysis of using Mac apps when I have to collaborate with people so often just doesn't pencil out in favor of native apps for most of the things I do. The few places where it does are things like Notes, which is a first party app that all Apple users have, but even then it's a pain for people on other platforms to collaborate.Forgot about all the Unix stuff. That part is easy to fix if they care about it. If Apple still wants the Mac to succeed as a native platform, they will have to solve enough of these problems for their developers that the Mac is a competitive native platform to the web. I don't really see a way forward for that strategy except building some sort of cross-platform UI toolkit, whether that means web apps run natively on the Mac or Mac apps run natively on the web and other platforms or what. Microsoft has been working fairly aggressively in integrating Windows with Android apps and building a new cross-platform app toolkit. Without progress on this front, I predict continuing decline of the Mac as a developer platform.