Jack Dorsey wants a web-only mobile OS
Good lord, where do I start with this? Jack, you’re a tech leader. Haven’t you at least heard of WebOS and Firefox OS before you asked that?
There have been so many attempts at making that OS that he wants I think he forgot until people started pointing it out to him in the replies. Firefox OS and WebOS were just two of the highest profile ones. Another “web-only” OS is Chrome OS which powers laptops.
His argument is the technology back then didn’t allow it but the web is advanced enough now to do it. But Jack, it has always been advanced enough for most of the apps you needed at the time.
If all he wanted was to release a social media app without having to adhere to platform rules and regulations, he can do that right now as web apps. In fact nobody will stop him from releasing such apps. Maybe he also forgot Twitter has been a web app for a long time.
WebOS was so far ahead of its time Apple and Google have been reintroducing its features on their respective platforms as new innovations in recent years.
The problem was not limited to the apps they wanted to build, that was the least of their worries. These attempts had so many other issues such as hardware spec, budget, marketing, determination, leadership, resources, resilience, developer outreach, public buy ins, and so on.
Many other attempts were little more than Android forks which is ironic because Google has always been a major advocate of web apps with their Progressive Web Apps efforts. All the web technologies built since 2008 have been moving towards making web apps as viable as native apps and many, if not all, have been adopted as web standards which will work on any modern browser.
Someone asked him how will people discover apps in a federated world. Bruh, there are things called directories! Anyone can build an app directory, any developer can promote them anywhere, there are social media platforms, YouTube channels, and this new thing called advertising, all the big brands are doing it, ever heard of advertising?
I think this is Jack projecting his insecurities and concerns that Apple and Google will soon boot Twitter off the stores for having no content moderation.
Twitter has plenty of porn, 13% of its content, in fact, according to a recent report, and they’re not censored. Even Reddit has content moderation. While certain keywords are currently blocked from Twitter search, porn is not very difficult to find there. The company’s former head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, penned an op ed for The NY Times on what could become of Twitter without content moderation, among other things.
There’s also the issue of payment processing. Both Apple and Google charge fees for purchases of digital items and Twitter’s new management wants to avoid that because they plan to generate the bulk of their revenue from subscription. Spotify, Netflix, and Amazon’s Kindle still have apps on Android and iOS/iPadOS but they don’t allow payments through the stores, only from their websites, to avoid that fee. They run what Apple calls “reader apps” , these are apps that don’t allow in-app purchases of digital items.
Twitter can do what Netflix and Spotify do, but if they plan to sell low cost high volume digital goods and services through the app, people will have to keep jumping to the web, quite an inconvenient barrier, to make those purchases. Those other companies only charge customers once a month so it’s less of an issue.