This post leads me to believe the author probably assumes there will always only be a handful of native platforms. I think, if we're lucky, the ecosystem will be far more diverse.
In the future I envision, noone in their right mind would ever think native is the way to go.
It seems we have different assumptions we're basing our arguments on.
I get the impression that the huge diversity of linux distros is enabled primarily by the fact that more and more development these days is web and not native.
I'm guessing they all (the linux distros), in one way or another, add value given each project's mission statement. Or at least they believe they are. Otherwise they probably wouldn't be doing it.
And I don't think we'd have to fear the OS will become a "glorified browser shell" if it wasn't the primary "app development platform".
Right now native app development is feasible. You have pretty much 3 platforms you really need to worry about developing for in order to have access to the largest amount of market share for the least amount of effort. Imagine even one more player enters the market and gains any respectable amount of market share.
Instantly every mobile app development team's efforts need to grow or every developer on each team's responsibilities grow linearly with the total number of platforms they need to develop for. From an operational standpoint it's not sound economics to make business decisions based on approaches that don't scale well.
There isn't any great diversity in Linux distros interface-wise. You basically have a handful of distros that use X Windows and one of the four old window managers.
I appreciate that. I agree it's not obvious what, if any differences exist between alot of the lesser-known distros. However I would argue that a large enough sample from the most popular Linux Distros has something substantively unique to offer.
But we haven't even considered BSD-flavor. Perhaps if we expanded to include BSD-based operating systems. To name a few: FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, PcBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD.
All of the BSDs mentioned above have a very unique mission.
It's easier for me (as consumer) to choose any one of those to run my desktop / laptop knowing that I'm going to pretty much get all the same access to apps that I would if I were to run Windows or OS X.
Without any reassurance that I'm going to be able to do what I need to do on a BSD or Linux machine, I'm probably going to be stuck choosing something created and maintained by Microsoft or Apple.
None taken. It's probably not worth arguing who is right or wrong since none of us can reasonably assume we know what the future will be, but I will say that in general (1) diversity in ecosystems is good. (2) Monopolies are bad. Given only these two basic assumptions I think it's obvious that there should / will be a push for more diversity in mobile, and thus a larger number of platforms to develop for.
This can only lead to one result which is for developers to want a unifying platform on which to develop. I would argue that this exists, and is improving. It's called the web and web browsers enable this unifying platform.
> It's probably not worth arguing who is right or wrong since none of us can reasonably assume we know what the future will be, but I will say that in general (1) diversity in ecosystems is good. (2) Monopolies are bad.
Diversity is good, but too much diversity can be detrimental. A one-mobile-OS world is a terrible thing, since there's no need to push forward and improve. A two-mobile-OS world is better, as long as it's easy for users to switch to whatever is better at the current time. Once you get beyond three, you end up with a situation where it takes more and more development time to cover less and less of the market, and it becomes more likely that a single winner emerges (for example, the DOS-to-GUI transition in the 1980s-1990s).
There's still competition when you have multiple browsers. Companies might create a proposal for a standard and then implement it in their browser. This may or may not become a standard but usually it is pretty close. In this way we can have the benefits of diversity without the negatives like having to have different skill sets for each platform and then of course there is Apple's walled garden.
In my crazy future I hope there will eventually be 100's of legitimate mobile OSes.
One of the reasons this would be possible is because the responsibility of app development theoretically wouldn't be aligned vertically with the company that developed the OS, or with some platform that company is responsible for developing.
In the future I envision, noone in their right mind would ever think native is the way to go.