Great article, love their effort to innovate but misleading IMHO. Android is doing it already as you’ve put it with their Chromebook, but how many of those apps are cross-plat Flutter, React-Native, Xamarin, NativeScript or hybrid Cordova / Ionics? Get it?

The web, or precisely JavaScript is eating the developer’s and user’s world. Just look at Stackoverflow’s yearly survey.

It is like everyone else says “against the grain”. WebAssembly is in the coming. The next foundation of Web apps and the next big step of building apps for cross-platform is in WASM. Open any second article on Medium and it is about e.g. “Build something with JavaScript”, not “Build the next thing with Swift”. What’s funny in previous statement is that we will probably be able to “run” Swift with WebAssembly in very near future. There is no need to invent another bridging technology which is proprietary. WASM is on GitHub! Best evidence in that way is Microsoft’s Blazor project which enables you to build client side apps (Electron included!) with you’ve guessed it… C# programming language ONLY! Don’t trust me, here is a guide / demo of a Blazor C# app moved into Electron with Electron.NET: https://cooldown.io/topic/16-getting-started-with-blazor-and-electronnet/

WASM development is on github: https://github.com/webassembly

So, to conclude, I think it is a shot in the foot. But again, they are huge company and they can put a lot of resource into such project. But, having devs to accept it and spin it out in a good and developed ecosystem will be a much bigger issue then the idea itself.

Not to sound too biased (which I am, doing web dev mostly) but I also write desktop apps with C# and do welcome Blazor/WASM to the desktop realm.