I want to make native apps but Apple and Microsoft seem to be trying really hard to stop me. I have to buy developer accounts, buy certificates for signing binaries, share 30% of my revenue with them for barely any reason and so on. Not to mention the mess they've introduced in their APIs - especially Microsoft. So of course we choose the much simpler, much cheaper way of the web.

There is perhaps some irony in the fact that this blog was posted to Medium, which serves 10.88 MB for a 265-word article.

My opinion about this is that yes, we lost our way, and the reason is very simple, it is because we could. It was the path of least resistance, so we took it.

Software has been freeriding on hardware improvements for a few decades, especially on web and desktop apps.

Moore's law has been a blessing and a curse.

The software you use today was written by people who learned their craft while this free-ride was still fully ongoing.

Again and again people complain about this. But it remains a fact that essentially nobody actually wants this.

Developers certainly like to have their completely integrated, connected and universal computing platform (the web). And users do not seem to particularly care about performance as long as it is good enough. And that is exactly the standard that is set, software is allowed to be so bad that it doesn't really annoy the user too much. Management doesn't care either, certainly creating good software isn't important when good enough software has already been developed.

Sure, I would like things to be different, but until one group decides that a drastic departure is necessary, nothing will change. There are also no real incentives for change, from any perspective.

It is interesting to see most people lay the blame at the feet of developers.

The reality is that these are all business decisions:

1) Move to the cloud because the business likes the steady payout of subscriptions. Business customers love not having to hire IT teams and demand six 9s of uptime because it is someone else’s responsibility. But performance needs to just be acceptable to end users.

2) Customers refusing to upgrade on-premises software, that led to long maintenance cycles and endless patches

3) Developing once for the web vs. Multiple times for different platforms – each needing its own developers and testers.

No amount of expertise on the part of developers is going to address these fundamental forces.