A look at upcoming technologies like Progressive Web Apps, WebAssembly, and Houdini that have the potential to dramatically improve web apps
Paul Miller / The Verge : Tweets: @scottdavis99 Tweets: Scott Davis / @scottdavis99 : Web apps are only getting better - The Verge “Slack is a web app. Trello is a web app. Google Docs. Gmail. Even Twitter.” http://www.theverge.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece caps a two-year arc in which the web app quietly closed the gap with native software. In 2016, Henrik Joreteg documented why he left iOS entirely — Progressive Web Apps were indistinguishable from native on Android but hobbled on iOS by WebKit's limitations — and by early 2017 Google had made the Android case concrete when Chrome 57 started placing PWAs in the app drawer and settings.
Paul Miller's survey of Progressive Web Apps, WebAssembly, and Houdini matters because it names the three levers that decide whether that gap closes everywhere or stays split by engine: installability and offline behavior, near-native compute, and CSS extensibility. The examples he leads with — Slack, Trello, Google Docs, Gmail, Twitter — are exactly the productivity workloads where the difference is most visible to users.
First-order effects
- Web-first companies like Slack, Trello, and Google Docs gain a credible path to native-grade performance and installation without maintaining separate codebases per platform.
Second-order effects
- Apple's WebKit restrictions become a competitive liability rather than just a developer grievance: as long as iOS lags on these APIs, the pressure from developers who already chose Android over iOS intensifies, and platforms like Slack — whose own roadmap emphasizes app discovery and interactivity for third-party developers — benefit from richer web delivery channels.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, browser engine capability becomes the real app-platform battleground: distribution shifts away from app-store gatekeeping toward whatever engine ships the APIs first, echoing the parallel push to rebuild apps on open infrastructure seen in the decentralized-web movement around Blockstack and OpenBazaar.
The trend: The browser is absorbing native-app capabilities layer by layer, with each engine vendor's API rollout — not any single framework — determining how fast web apps replace installed software.