
What to Do When You Get Sherlocked by Apple - ingve
https://blog.astropad.com/sherlocked-by-apple/
======
ChrisMarshallNY
This happened to me, in the early 1990s.

I spent months writing a very capable MIDI driver. In those days, writing a
MIDI driver was a truly non-trivial exercise, as you had to have a MIDI
adapter that fed back a 1MHz clock, which you would then program their UART to
clock down.

That UART was also a pretty hairy bit of hardware. You had to program it with
ASM, and the chip was set up so that a 16-bit address range corresponded to
various control states. Setting control states for the chip meant a LOT of
homework.

MIDI drivers basically were about as difficult as you could get, as you needed
to step down an external clock, and set up things like ring buffers that were
large enough to not trip over their own feet during an intense session.

Anyhoo, after a couple of months of working on the driver (and buying a DX-7
as a test bed), I was just about to announce it, when Apple came up with a
package of OS utilities that included...a MIDI driver.

I don't think that theirs was as good as mine, but that was beside the point.

I open-sourced the driver, but the OS community wasn't particularly well-
established back then, and I believe that it's lost in the sands of time.

~~~
luftfield
So in other words embedded hardware programming hasn’t changed a bit.

~~~
bobowzki
Embedded programming usually change bits :-)

------
pcr910303
I'm sorry for Astropad as they have made such a good product, but to be
honest, this doesn't feel like Astropad being sherlocked; I'm pretty sure
Apple was experimenting with this from the very first iPad Pro.

The idea to connect the iPad to use as a second display isn't that unique,
there's Duet Display (founded by an ex Apple engineer), Astropad, and I think
I've seen a couple of more apps. Watson was a pretty unique product; that's
why people recognized Sherlock as a copy of Watson... but this feels like a
company that developed a Voice Memo app for macOS complaining that macOS
Mojave 'sherlocked' them by including Voice Memo by default.

~~~
rolltiide
Does anyone have an app that lets me draw on the ipad and show it live on my
laptop? Is that what astropad and now Sidecar does?

I resorted to joining Zoom meetings twice and sharing the screen with my ipad
session as host and drawing in the Notes App

~~~
fitzroy
That's a pretty funny/clever hack (took me a minute to figure out you're
Zooming with yourself). You can also try AirServer (similar to Reflector).
There's a free trial. [https://www.airserver.com](https://www.airserver.com)

I use it mainly for audio streaming from my phone to my MacMini / Stereo, and
sometimes to play Alto's Adventure on a projector.

Or, if your Mac is compatible, just try Sidecar. There's a hack to make it
work on older Macs, but I think officially it's tied to the ones that have
hardware HEVC/h.265 support. [http://osxdaily.com/2019/10/11/sidecar-
compatible-mac-ipad-l...](http://osxdaily.com/2019/10/11/sidecar-compatible-
mac-ipad-list/)

~~~
rolltiide
> That's a pretty funny/clever hack (took me a minute to figure out you're
> Zooming with yourself).

Yes, multiple Zoom sessions from my same user account. I'd mostly do this to
convey a diagram live with other people, that I would draw out. So They'd join
once, I would join on one device and my ipad, with the first device being so
they could see me sitting normally during the whole session.

------
giancarlostoro
> We admittedly got swept up in a false romance with Apple. Over the past few
> years, Apple routinely invited us to demo our products at their
> headquarters, and offered to help us out with whatever business and
> engineering challenges we faced. They also ordered thousands of dollars’
> worth of our hardware, and we naively thought it was because they were
> interested in our product. It turns out that they were… just not in the way
> we were thinking.

Holy crap they got (HBO) Silicon Valley "Brain Raped."[0] What sickens me is
that Apple wouldnt just outright buy them out instead. If you are designing
something like this... Make sure you patent as much as possible. That would of
guaranteed a buyout. Course not sure how patentable that idea would of been by
now if they had other competitors.

[0]:
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=JlwwVuSUUfc](https://youtube.com/watch?v=JlwwVuSUUfc)

~~~
wincent
Maybe this is a case where the old adage applies: "never attribute to malice
that which is adequately explained by a byzantine organizational structure in
which the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing".

While its certainly plausible that Apple engaged in some kind of two-faced
corporate espionage here, another plausible explanation is that Apple is an
enormous company, and the part of it that was working on Sidecar had little or
no connection at all with the part that was talking to Astropad.

~~~
catalogia
> _" never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by a
> byzantine organizational structure in which the left hand doesn't know what
> the right is doing"_

Is there utility in such a distinction?

~~~
rictic
Improved ability to understand the present and predict the future?

e.g. if malice, then sharing ideas is more dangerous; if byzantine
organization dynamics, then it's less dangerous.

~~~
catalogia
The effect is the same. If you assume malice, the actions you end up
predicting are identical to the actions you predict if you assume byzantine
organization. They are functionally equivalent. The distinction is hardly even
a distinction at all, since byzantine organizations are often malicious. Even
if no particular individual in the organization has malicious intent, the
actions of the organization as a whole may be malicious.

~~~
rictic
It would be very surprising indeed if they were truly indistinguishable.

------
tpmx
> For our team of just 13 people

In the 1990s, 2000s, or heck even early 2010s this would have been an open
source utility that someone had spent a few months building as a passion
project. And then 5-10 people from around the world would have pitched in a
work week here and there to make it work really well and lots of people using
it would be really happy from using it.

Now, because everything that possibly can be monetized needs to be monetized..
it has to be monetized. And everything needs to be made into a company, with
programmers, product management, marketing, HR, legal etc etc.

I hate to defend Apple here, because I think they are beginning to halt
progress rather than bring it forward, but.. meh. It's just a goddamn feature.
You can't call dibs on obvious features. (And in terms of obviousness, I think
this one is a _lot_ more obvious than Sherlock.)

~~~
semiotagonal
The creators of this tool chose to create a company and try to actually make a
living off of their idea. I don't see why this should count against them; in
fact with the open-source tools of the 2000s now experiencing "license regret"
over cloud services product-izing their software (e.g. MongoDB), it probably
makes sense to stake out the commercial territory yourself before someone else
does.

And the author isn't calling "dibs" at all; her company's product hit the
market first, but she isn't claiming any right to that market.

~~~
tpmx
Maybe I'm just being old here, but MongoDB (initial release 2009) doesn't
really feel like the old guard of open source to me.

Not calling dibs: fair enough.

Edit: Just noticed the pronoun you used and was confused. I vaguely remember
these people (the creators of this product) from when they launched the
product as, well, male.

Turns out they still are: Here's their separate blog post btw:

[https://blog.astropad.com/a-message-from-astropads-
founders/](https://blog.astropad.com/a-message-from-astropads-founders/)

~~~
semiotagonal
The founders are male, but the author of the post isn't one of the founders. I
edited my previous comment to reflect the authorship.

------
mondoshawan
Usually I root for the underdog, but in this case, it was almost inevitable. I
have both Astropad and a iPad Pro, and I have to say that they priced
themselves out of the market straight out of the gate by using a high cost
subscription (~$20/mo) plus ~$20 for the hardware dongle. At these prices,
professionally it's actually cheaper to just go buy an Intuos because it will
perform better in every way and doesn't cost you over time.

TBH, I'm actually surprised this didn't happen sooner -- it's the obvious
solution to a lagging Adobe Photoshop and pro tools that immediately give the
iPad strong value and staying power.

~~~
leoh
Their pricing model is besides the point. Apple extended interest and kindness
towards them and then copied their products. It's just kind of cruel. These
are the types of rotten actions that make people more generally cynical and
disappointed about large corporations and the valley.

~~~
GhettoMaestro
> [...] Apple extended interest and kindness towards them and then copied
> their products. It's just kind of cruel.

No it isn't.

That is capitalism and cut-throat business. These guys were foolish for
getting so close to Apple when Apple could literally destroy their entire
business by adding a single _feature_.

Protip: If your business is defined by a single feature, your strategy sucks.

~~~
catalogia
It's not cruel, but it is cut-throat? Isn't cut-throat cruel? You're using a
different word to say the same thing.

------
dahart
I was surprised by how positive and constructive this article is considering
the circumstances. Say what you want about whether it was foreseeable, being
blindsided by your platform is _not_ fun. I’m sure there were some swear words
used the first couple of days, but some companies in the same situation have
just closed up shop, so putting it behind you and moving on with hope and
positivity, recognizing that there are still options, and noting that one of
them is to stay there and compete with Apple, that’s commendable.

~~~
saagarjha
Generally, writing whining hit pieces doesn’t get you the kind of sympathy or
support you’d want. Plus it just makes you look bad.

------
bhauer
I'm not in the Apple ecosystem so I've not previously heard of this product,
nor Sidecar or the amusing verb "sherlocked."

I don't have a lot to add except to say that the blog entry was substantially
more insightful, honest, introspective, and valuable to the reader than I
would have expected given the circumstances. The author and the company
deserve a lot of credit for dealing with setbacks so graciously. Meanwhile,
Apple deserves another helping of skepticism.

I look forward to seeing what kinds of creative display tricks Astropad comes
up with in their multi-platform adventures on Rust.

------
remote_phone
If your business can be replaced so easily, then unfortunately what you have
built is a feature, not a product.

~~~
oldmanhorton
Large tech companies have the resources to clone any single piece of software
engineering or hardware engineering. The marginal cost of developing a new
"feature" of their existing "product" is so small in the grand scheme of
things. As long as you have software engineers, money, and an idea, you can
make something like sidecar real; this company needed to create all three from
scratch, Apple has oodles of the first two and can easily steal ideas for the
third. With that being said, if the only definition of a product is something
that Apple can't replicate, then I'm afraid we are damn near out of products.

(Again, this applies to every large tech company, not just apple)

~~~
threeseed
Companies can clone features not products.

And they will only do so in a market that is core to them.

~~~
sombremesa
Companies do clone products though - see Amazon Basics.

------
AndrewKemendo
It's probably too early to know if astropad can actually survive this, or if
it can create a sustainable business so this article is premature.

My company was Sherlocked in 2017 when Apple released ARKit and our flagship
product, an AR SDK with SLAM was made obsolete overnight. We knew it was
coming, but didn't know when, so we diversified into mobile-web computer
vision products before it happened.

Didn't matter though, the third party mobile AR tool landscape isn't robust
enough to sustain more than a handful of content companies. All the hard tech
in AR is being done by FB, Goog and Apple so we were dead in the long run
anyway.

We were lucky though that a niche market for our mobile web product was
desirable enough for an acquisition and we found that offramp. I don't think
most companies can survive a sherlocking.

------
claudeganon
I honestly have zero sympathy for them.

I have an older Mac as my daily driver and was bummed to learn it was excluded
from the Sidecar functionality. As a daily Wacom user, I’ve really wanted this
feature.

So, I went and looked at Astropad and learned that their pricing is based
around a ludicrous subscription model and they lock basic functionality behind
it (like shortcuts). They obviously don’t understand their market because
Adobe is near reviled by digital artists nowadays for these kind of tactics.

If they had at all been reasonable in their to pricing, they would have been
fine. Most artists I know hold onto their hardware for a long time and
would’ve payed (reasonably) for support/their feature set. But because they
got greedy, people will just wait and upgrade to the built-in support on newer
devices.

------
buserror
I also got sherlocked around 15 years ago. At the time I was working for a
music company, and I was in very close loop with apple CoreAudio and CoreMIDI
guys. I had (still have) a whole bunch of apple employees or ex- as friends.

Rather enthusiastically I was advocating, and filing bugs to allow me to ship
a side project I had been working on for quite a while: A way to network MIDI
devices on OSX. Multicast, very low latency, auto-discovery etc. I basically
entirely trusted them with all the ideas, thinking it wasn't something they
would need, or care, to ship in OSX at any time in the future because it was
so niche.

I was wrong, next major OSX version, they had it -- in a more primitive way
than my product -- but they had it.

I that point I had been a mac developer, one of the old school, since 1985 or
so. And I literally dropped tools and decided to do something else entirely.

Now I still use a Hackintosh mostly for a few programs I still cary on using,
but my work has entirely shifted away from Apple.

~~~
threeseed
You don't own ideas.

And so if it's a great idea that is going to benefit consumers not sure why
Apple wouldn't add it.

~~~
buserror
Somehow, by reading you, I can almost guarantee that will never be a situation
that you'll find yourself into. Bless.

------
ricardobeat
> that closely copied our product lines

Interesting comment by a company whose apps replicate what has been available
for almost a decade. I remember using software to turn my 1st generation iPad
into a second screen, back in 2010. Have been through at least three variants
of the same app since.

I'm not happy with platform owners eating more and more of their own market,
and think some of the anti-competitive clauses of app stores should be
illegal, but there is no high horse to stand on here.

------
deltron3030
Provide remote iPad features for Windows and Linux users!

~~~
zapzupnz
Several products already exist for this purpose, including Duet Display, one
of the Splashtop products (can't remember which). I'm sure there are others.

It made reading this article a bit off-putting because they seem to imagine
they were the sole bearers of such a product; they were not and never have
been.

~~~
scarface74
This has been possible since 2012.

[https://www.extremetech.com/computing/138762-how-to-use-
your...](https://www.extremetech.com/computing/138762-how-to-use-your-ios-
device-as-your-pc-second-display)

You’ve also been able to hack stuff like this together using VNC.

~~~
chrischen
I also used a VNC client to turn my iPhone into a trackpad my mac... slightly
unrelated but no notable latency and similar tech used.

------
schappim
When Apple Sherlocks you, you Moriarty them in return.

Hear: Make your product better and more feature rich, focusing on a narrow
segment of the mass market Apple is trying to serve.

~~~
EricE
Exactly - I'll still us my Luna Display because it has features Sidecar
doesn't.

------
archiepeach
Isn’t this quite similar to what happens when a supermarket creates their own
brand version of a product, and places it alongside the copies product, albeit
with a much cheaper price?

I felt quite bad for Spotify and Flux when Apple Music and Night shift came
out, but I guess this is a risk when you use any type of platform to reach
customers.

Diversification is a good idea, I’m impressed was impressed with the response
in the article.

~~~
underwater
A supermarket still charges for the own brand product. Apple's own-brand
product is effectively free to the consumer.

This poisons the well for an entire genre of productivity apps.

------
linuxftw
How to have this not happen to you:

1) Have your work patented. 2) Be acquired by a larger firm that can enforce
your patents.

If you don't have a patent, then anyone can copy anything you create, and
economies of scale are going to catch up to you and force you out of business.

I personally don't believe in patents, but it's the only way to operate today.

~~~
cycloptic
>Be acquired by a larger firm that can enforce your patents.

You mean like Apple? What other firm is going to acquire a startup with
products like this, which are so tightly tied into MacOS/iOS?

~~~
briandear
Wacom. Avid. Adobe. There are a lot of companies that would buy tech like
Astropad. Adobe could have integrated it into CS for instance and it would
have been a value-add for that audience.

~~~
cycloptic
Even if the software itself ticks a nice box as a feature add to some other
product, the patents wouldn't have fit into the portfolios of any of those
companies. To make it a profitable investment they would have had to pre-
meditate a licensing deal... with Apple.

------
chrischen
Prior to using Sidecar I was using Duet Display, which is a software solution
to the Luna hardware module. I can't see any benefits of using Luna over the
Duet App, and most of the Pros/Cons on the Luna website are outdated as of
Duet 2. If Sidecar didn't kill Luna, Duet would have.

------
flurdy
So... Don't be a one-trick pony?

Duh, quite obvious, diversification is what all companies desire, but most
just try and milk the golden goose for as long as possible. Until it is too
late.

It does astonish me though when every year I walk through the booths at AWS
Summit (poor man's Re:Invent) and see all these companies that are a feature-
announcement-in-one-tiny-paragraph-in-an-AWS-blog-post away from going out of
business. But I guess it pays the mortgage bills for a lot of people until
those blog posts.

------
travisgriggs
The add on/enhancement business is always risky. As the author says,oin one
hand it's kinda validating when it happens, otoh it obviously means you're
going to have to find a new "got to have tool" to hawk. There will never be a
"sit back and watch the dollars roll in" in this space. Either the
platform/ecosystem/standard offering eats you up OR everyone else smells the
cash and moves in and the race to the bottom of profitablity begins.

As an oldie, who remembers the kinds of money that was being made in the late
80s early 90s in software development tools? Cool languages. Powerful
compilers. CASE tools. Libraries. Innovative IDEs. I worked in that space
(Smalltalk VisualWorks). Businesses paid good money to fund those efforts, to
try and have competitive advantage to develop better solutions than the
competition. But in a similar vein, the OS vendors (as well as free open
source) moved into this space, and then there was very little money to be made
in 3rd party software development tools.

So I feel these guys pain. But the expansion transcends the particular type of
add in they're making money in.

------
PeterStuer
This is what worked in a 'Sherlocked' case I was involved with:

(1) Take a deep breath, don't pretend nothing happened

(2) Don't _just_ compete, look at how you can provide additional value to
those customers that will also use the incumbent's offering

(3) Get on with your roadmap on improving value for and delighting _all_ your
customers

When Microsoft announced Teams [1], we thought our own team collaboration
product [2] would be severely impacted. Not that we were surprised that
Microsoft came out with this product after having lauded ours in the past.
Team collaboration was always on their radar, and had been declared strategic
for years. But I will not deny that it still makes you feel as if the ground
beneath your feet is rumbling.

We knew from past experiences, and our contacts, that Microsoft would push
this product hard into their ecosystem. So we had to keep in mind that most of
our customers would be aware of it if not already, soon, and at least there
would be questions of whether they should consider going with Microsoft or
not.

But we also had been competing successfully for years as a 'small indie' shop
against outfits that were swimming in VC money, so stiff competition was not a
'new' experience. However, Microsoft being the gorilla in the room stapling in
their offering into O365 might be a different beast altogether.

So what to do?

First we acknowledged that going forward many of our customers would also have
Teams, by choice or by company policy. So we looked at how our customers might
benefit from having both. I think this is a key question you should ask. Not
just 'how is my offer better than theirs', but how are both together better
than just the competing offer from the behemoth?

In our case this meant two things

\- making sure that you play nice with the new app, in a way that the
experience of using both is seamless.

\- find specific scenarios where the users of the incumbent app benefit from
having yours as well

We developed an integration with Teams[3] that covered these points. We also
doubled down on our roadmap, making sure that both standalone and dual app
users receive increased value over time. Dual might be a bit of a misnomer
since nearly 100% of our customer base even before Teams touched collaboration
across different applications and services, Outlook and SharePoint being the
most prominent.

I'm not saying this is a recipe that will lead to guaranteed success in every
case. It worked for us and we kept growing both our customer base and revenue
all through the advent of Teams and thereafter. Of course I can not compare
this to a world where Teams was never introduced. I remain however convinced
that where possible, the strategy of not just competing but also adding value
to those customers that chose or were forced onto the platform provider's own
offer is far preferable to one were you just go head-to-head.

Always offer the best product, but also offer the better-together experience.

[1] [https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-
teams](https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams)

[2] [https://tasksinabox.com/apps](https://tasksinabox.com/apps)

[3] [https://tasksinabox.com/integrations/microsoft-teams-
integra...](https://tasksinabox.com/integrations/microsoft-teams-integration)

~~~
toyg
It helps that the Teams UI is a tyre fire - or at least it was for a long time
until I just stopped using it.

~~~
PeterStuer
Absolutely. But you can not rely on Microsoft or Apple or Google or whatever
is your favorite evil corp be filled with 'mindless corporate drones' or
'bogged down with process that will snuff out everything that is good'.

Assume their next iteration will be better. Then what? By all means, believe
in your team to be competitive head-to-head. But also assume
Microsoft/Apple/google/... will be present and eventually if not already
will/might be pretty decent.

Or they might just be part of the package. For many of our product champions
in corporate environments, SharePoint was not something they _chose_ , but it
still was part of their daily reality and not something they could ignore or
stop using.

I hope I'm not downplaying just how hard it can be when your core revenue
generating product is just being completely commoditized by a 'ham
sandwich'[1]. I'm just trying to relate an experience where we could absorb
and even grow through the impact in the hope it might keep others from being
discouraged in difficult times

[1] Steve Ballmer, famously said the company could bundle a ham sandwich into
Windows if it wanted to

------
musicale
Sidecar is an obvious OS feature that I've wanted since the original iPad, and
the third-party attempts/solutions from VNC to Remote Desktop to Air Display
to AstroPad to Duet to Luna were not great and some of them added very
annoying bits like subscription pricing (seriously?) or clunky/expensive
hardware adapters.

I also considered how easy it is to have your iPhone screen show up as an
video source in QuickTime Player, just by plugging in a lightning cable...

I'm deleting basically all of them (possibly excepting VNC, which has a few
different use cases) and switching to Sidecar.

------
dr_j_
I use a non-airplay compatible MacBook Pro from mid 2010 and I am rather
disappointed at the overall product offering for these slightly older
machines. While I find you can mirror the display to an iPad, it seems
impossible to use one as genuine secondary display (such that it could be used
for extra screen real estate). I paid for several products over the last few
months only to be disappointed in this way. Perhaps therefore a niche could be
to support older machines like my mid 2010 MacBook pro?

~~~
shiftpgdn
I don't think a decade old laptop is slightly older. That's amazing that it's
still running.

------
hartator
[https://lunadisplay.com/pages/luna-and-mac-
mini](https://lunadisplay.com/pages/luna-and-mac-mini)

Can’t you do that with SideCar as well?

I was thinking doing this instead of buying a new Apple Tv. Like having an
iPad driving a Mac Mini via SideCar but also connected to a regular tv.

------
pier25
Apple reminds me of Amazon knowing which products are popular in its store and
replicating them with its own brand.

------
tekromancr
Alternative term: getting f.luxed over

------
bredren
I remember during the early facebook app dev days, there was a very popular
Independent ncaa tourney bracket app.

Then fb partnered w some big name to do another app that copied the
functionality very poorly, but fb promoted it far and above the other all,
effectively killing it.

------
orasis
Apple got an Emmy for our tech that they copied. Don't show big companies
shit.

------
robert_edwards
I think item 6 is key:

Lesson #6: Lean into your competitive advantages by showing off what
differentiates you from Apple.

This is exactly why I continue to pay for an Alfred license over just using
basic spotlight search.

------
xwdv
What people seem to forget is that this is nothing personal, only business. A
company has the right to compete with your product, and you are not entitled
to any sort of market share. That’s just the way capitalism works, and the
consumers are better off because of it.

~~~
deltron3030
Sure, but don't expect that devs are loyal to you and your ecosystem. Think
different is dead!

~~~
xwdv
In a few words: Fuck them.

------
tyiz
MaxiVista was first with using a computer as a 2nd screen. Loooong ago in
2003. later there also was an iOS App.

------
Trias11
Patenting, Trademarking and Copyrighting would be a good way to protect your
IP from few sides.

------
edent
I've read the whole article and I've literally no idea what either product
does.

I use a Mac for work - and most of user that I know don't slavishly follow the
glorified press conference that Apple holds. I dare say most users don't know
about most of the new features in the utility laptop they buy or are forced to
use at work.

~~~
egypturnash
These are both tools for professional artists.

Astropad lets you use your iPad as a second display for your Mac, with an
emphasis on functioning as a tool for artists. It used to support multiple
iPad styluses but moved to only supporting the Apple Pencil.

Sidecar lets you use your iOS13 iPad as a second display for your Catalina
Mac, with an emphasis on functioning as a tool for artists. I have not used it
but I am pretty sure it only supports the Apple Pencil.

Both of these are sort of functioning as an alternative to buying an external
monitor with pressure-sensitive stylus support, which is generally going to be
more expensive than a tablet - Wacom's Cintiq line, for instance, runs from
$700 for a 13-inch screen to $3300 for a 32-inch screen.

They are also in competition with the growing power of tablet apps; there's a
lot of former Photoshop painters who have switched to Procreate or the tablet
version of Manga Studio to get their work done.

~~~
crooked-v
> I have not used it but I am pretty sure it only supports the Apple Pencil.

It works fine with touch. The Pencil just allows for more precision and easier
secondary actions.

~~~
egypturnash
True, I suppose. I was thinking more about support for other styluses, I
really can't imagine trying to run Illustrator via fingerpainting.

------
api
One of the first examples of being Sherlocked was done by Microsoft when they
basically killed Netscape by adding Internet Explorer to Windows.

~~~
remote_phone
An earlier one is in MS-DOS when they added Doublespace disk compression which
killed Stacker.

~~~
oceanghost
No finer way was there to lose data.

~~~
blueboo
The finest way is to run Catalina on a $5000 iMac Pro.

~~~
auggierose
Try running it on a $10000 iMac Pro. No data loss yet ;-)

------
ecmascript
I think the author is missing the most vital point and that is why you should
develop web applications and not native applications, if possible. With
native, you have big companies that is in control of the platform and can
easily make it hard for you any time. Besides, with a web app, you can reach
customers on many different platforms making it harder for one company to kill
your business.

The web on the other hand is open and no single company can just change it in
a whim.

Always believe in the web.

~~~
briandear
Web apps are good for CRUD but little else. What film editor is going to edit
a movie using a web browser? What kind of powerful image editing can you do on
a web app? Who is going to use ForeFlight in a cockpit over the web? Who wants
to play Call of Duty in a browser.

The web is good for displaying information, but it’s not a 1-1 replacement for
native.

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ecmascript
I never said all apps should be web apps. I just wrote "always believe in the
web" and that you should make a web app if possible.

But I honestly think all your examples are soon to be quite possible with
WebGL and WebAssembly. Most apps I use today are web apps so you can do a lot
more than just display CRUD. That is simply BS from your part.

Some examples, I stream all my movies that I rent via youtube, I talk to
people in real time via Discord, I download files with WebTorrent and I do all
my coding in Visual Studio Code.

All of those are web apps and none of those would I consider only to be CRUD
apps. Downvote all you want, it is still true that you can do a lot more than
simply CRUD on the web.

There is even image editors coming up, sure they are a bit basic still but I
think that is about to change: [https://pixlr.com/x/](https://pixlr.com/x/)

