>"If our future does shift towards thin-clients and web-browsers"
Please no. I like to control what I have. No way for me to be fed by thin client. Sure I do not mind web apps / services where it makes sense (banking for example). But the possibility to be suddenly cut off for whatever reason (maybe my app provider does not like my political views) - fuck that. Or when everything goes through some portal what will prohibit from them jacking up subscription fees sky high? I understand by many developers wanting to use webapp hummer for everything but I think they're digging their own grave
Those problems are also realistically an issue for native apps. The internet is your distribution platform regardless of if the web is your target.
I would hope that the industry could work together to provide a comfortable cross-platform app development experience, but none of the big players bought-in. So now the web is our only option, and they're the ones to blame.
For what it is worth I distribute my products from my company's website. However little reputation I have is all mine. It does not depend on some portal. The revenue is all mine as well. Besides those products are heavy apps that use features not accessible from non native apps.
My answer was in particular to: "If our future does shift towards thin-clients and web-browsers".
Thin client leaves processing to a server. It does not matter in this case if your "offline-first" UI is resident / cached on a client side. These are just glorified web bookmarks
Please no. I like to control what I have. No way for me to be fed by thin client. Sure I do not mind web apps / services where it makes sense (banking for example). But the possibility to be suddenly cut off for whatever reason (maybe my app provider does not like my political views) - fuck that. Or when everything goes through some portal what will prohibit from them jacking up subscription fees sky high? I understand by many developers wanting to use webapp hummer for everything but I think they're digging their own grave