Great? You sure about that?
It's an artefact of a very flawed culture, and is extremely suboptimal in pretty much every sense. Performance aside, how can you not be fed up with every app constantly reimplementing what has been done and done better years if not decades ago. Why are we making yet another file manager, instead of interfacing with existing ones? Yet another conversation tree that has no idea how to be a tree, yet another media player that has like 2 controls, yet another playlist interface that is backwards, yet another pagination interface that can't jump to a page, yet another moody search/filtering interface, yet another text editor that can't copy/paste text and so on?
Because we don't really like creating or adhering to any standards, we don't like empowering users, we like controlling/exploiting them. We know what they need, and better than anyone before us. And anyway, we can't interface with existing programs cause they are our rivals. This is the culture now, and even those who dislike it are forced to adhere to it to a degree, forced to exist in that ecosystem, acquire skills and understanding through that lense.
To put it in perspective, imagine if everyone abandoned all the current browser features and started reimplementing them entirely in html canvas, and used brainfuck as scripting language in this new framework. That's what the "web platform" did.
I tried to come up with a ridiculous impossible example here, but, aside from brainfuck, I guess some people actually do this ._.
wait a minute... I do this o_o
my excuse is I make it native and just deploy to web as "most irrelevant secondary platform, yes".
I wasn't suggesting to build a file manager from scratch with native UI instead of Web UI, I was suggesting to not build a new file manager at all and reuse an existing one. Instead of standardizing a whole browser within which you can create a file manager, standardize some sort of a network filesystem, that can cover a whole slue of use cases people make custom(often sub-par) UI for. Similar arguments can be made for the other examples.
"It looks better" is not really an argument. Looks are subjective and therefore should be customizable by the user, and not imposed on them by you. Not saying that native apps are perfect in that regard, but they always had that kind of a dimension/concern/feature in mind, while web went completely opposite trying to make everyting exactly the same everywhere, entirely against its own initial design.
In my opinion, it succeeded(in as much that it succeeded) not because it was strictly superior, but because the culture was ever so slightly better. The copyright was not being abused in the traditional sense, apps were free, without DRM(initially), which attracted users. Of course instead of realizing this and leaning more towards free software values, and making things even better, and maybe going back to native with the same approach, most were just following fads and their greed, so ended up in the same boat of abuse of users, monopolization of markets, and unhealthy rivalry between developers.
