Vic Gundotra, Google’s engineering vice president and developer evangelist, said on Friday at the Mobilebeat conference in San Francisco that the future of the mobile industry lies in web-based applications, rather than native software coded to run on specific smartphone operating systems.
“Many, many applications can be delivered through the browser and what that does for our costs is stunning,” Gundotra was quoted in a Financial Times report. “We believe the web has won and over the next several years, the browser, for economic reasons almost, will become the platform that matters and certainly that’s where Google is investing.”
Google is hell-bent on this “the web is the OS” idea, and it’s starting to sound sillier and sillier. I mean, with 1.5 billion apps downloaded, Apple’s App Store is doing just fine. Not to mention the web simply can’t replicate what well-written, powerful native apps can do.