Appstore / Native Platform camp is risking everything by ignoring the Web / Browser PWA model

Continuing on from your other thread … to me this sounds a lot like a case of the Birmingham Screwdriver, and/or Kaplan’s Law of the Instrument: “Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.”

Yes, Javascript and web tech and so on are great tools, but no one tool is optimal for all problems. And as you’ve hopefully discovered in that other thread, just as web developers have to consider a bunch of stuff that game/sim developers usually do not, game/sim developers have to consider a bunch of stuff that web developers usually do not.

In particular, real-time 3D graphics and physics gain huge benefits from low-level or even hardware-specific optimisation. Just as I couldn’t make an effective, non-trivial web app without understanding the various abstractions and interactions between different parts of a web application system, you can’t make an effective, non-trivial game/sim without understanding things like how real time 3D graphics and physics work. Even assuming that can be overcome, games and sims often rely on inclusion of massive amounts of bespoke data*. I’d really rather not have to re-download content every time I run a game, and there are plenty of places where internet connections simply wouldn’t be able to handle that in the first place.

So sure… Javascript may be popular, and rightfully so. It’s great at some things. But that doesn’t mean every other tool should just cease to exist. Native / low-level apps still have their place, and likely will have for ages to come.

  • I’m currently downloading a game to my PS4 which is over ~40gb in size, and it’s not unusual.
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