Appstore / Native Platform camp is risking everything by ignoring the Web / Browser PWA model

Unity are firmly putting all their eggs into the Appstore / Native camp in line with Apple, that's the reality. They're completely ignorant of the PWA storm that's coming.

This is a much bigger battle than Unity and Unity devs think, Javascript is by far the number 1 language in the world and Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and a lot of others are all lining up against Apple and the Appstore native only model not just in 3D / games...

https://www.cnet.com/news/google-web-app-plans-collide-with-apple-iphone-safari-rules/

Unity need to understand how small they are and not fight, they need to put resources into hiring some devs that really have web experience, ditch Emscripten laziness and do a proper browser / Javascript WebGPU build target implementation.

 

Continuing on from your other thread... to me this sounds a lot like a case of the Birmingham Screwdriver, and/or Kaplan's Law of the Instrument: "Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding."

Yes, Javascript and web tech and so on are great tools, but no one tool is optimal for all problems. And as you've hopefully discovered in that other thread, just as web developers have to consider a bunch of stuff that game/sim developers usually do not, game/sim developers have to consider a bunch of stuff that web developers usually do not.

In particular, real-time 3D graphics and physics gain huge benefits from low-level or even hardware-specific optimisation. Just as I couldn't make an effective, non-trivial web app without understanding the various abstractions and interactions between different parts of a web application system, you can't make an effective, non-trivial game/sim without understanding things like how real time 3D graphics and physics work. Even assuming that can be overcome, games and sims often rely on inclusion of massive amounts of bespoke data*. I'd really rather not have to re-download content every time I run a game, and there are plenty of places where internet connections simply wouldn't be able to handle that in the first place.

So sure... Javascript may be popular, and rightfully so. It's great at some things. But that doesn't mean every other tool should just cease to exist. Native / low-level apps still have their place, and likely will have for ages to come.

* I'm currently downloading a game to my PS4 which is over ~40gb in size, and it's not unusual.

 

Riiiight.

Spoiler

https://threepanel.com/t/cube-drone/18/70

Being "popular" is not equivalent to being "good".

 

What the heck would be a "proper" javascript build target? Creating a 100% javascript version of Unity?