The age of hybrid apps

I’ve written and talked about hybrid apps before. For instance, in the spring of 2007 I wrote about the end of desktop vs. web apps.

When I last wrote about this subject there was no iPhone and no iPhone SDK and no 40,000 apps.

And now it seems that hybrid apps are so common, and so expected, that there doesn’t need to be a name for it anymore. They’re just apps.

That’s the world I’ve wanted to get to since I started doing this stuff in mid ’90s. And we’re there.

Maximum looseness

I’ve seen people write silly things like “web data always belongs in a web browser.” Or, “why would I ever run code on my computer?” It’s easy to knock stuff like this down, but responding to it with words never changes any minds.

Responding with applications — thousands of them! — does change minds.

I’d bet those people are now running Twitter clients on their iPhones.

I like the liberty and looseness of not being stuck with two hard categories of apps. We’re all free to get to the same place, the place where we delight users with cool stuff, by combining different technologies in different ways.

This way the web isn’t just this thing on the side that only appears in browsers. It’s everywhere. It’s the oxygen of modern computing.