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Platform Strategy and Its Discontents
Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress.
Platforms like Android and Flutter deliver subsets of these properties but capitulate to capture by the host OS agenda, allowing their developers to be taxed through app stores and proprietary API lock-in. The market for web developers will stop expanding, and the safe, open, interoperable, gatekeeper-free future for computing will be entirely foreclosed — or at least the difficulty will go from "slow build" to "cold-start problem"; several orders of magnitude harder (and therefore unlikely). Contra the framework apologists, pervasive, preventable failure to deliver usable mobile experiences is often because we're dragging around IE8 compat and long toolchains premised on outdated priors like a ball and chain.
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