My thinking is that, ultimately, if you want to run the same code on Windows, MacOS, and a few popular Linux distros, and to do so on x86 and ARM, you need some kind of VM that translates an intermediate code to the machine code, and that implements a whole ton of system APIs for each platform. Especially if you want access to a GUI, networking, location, 3D graphics, Bluetooth, sound etc. - all of which have virtually no standardization between these platforms.
You'll then have to convince Microsoft, Apple, Google, IBM RedHat, Canonical, the Debian project, and a few others, to actually package this VM with their OSs, so that users don't have to manually choose to install it.
Then, you need to come up with some system of integrating this with, at a minimum, password managers, SAML and OAuth2, or you'll have something far less usable and secure than an equivalent web app. You'll probably have to integrate it with many more web technologies in fact, as people will eventually want to be able to show some web pages or web-formatted emails inside their apps.
So, my prediction is that any such effort will end-up reimplementing the browser, with little to no advantages when all is said and done.
Personally, I hate developing any web-like app. The GUI stack in particular is atrocious, with virtually no usable built-in controls, leading to a proliferation of toolkits and frameworks that do half the job and can't talk to each other. I'm hopeful that WASM will eventually allow more mature GUI frameworks to be used in web apps in a cross-platform manner, and we can forget about using a document markup language for designing application UIs. But otherwise, I think the web model is here to stay, and has in fact proven to be the most successful app ecosystem ever tried, by far (especially when counting the numerous iOS and Android apps that are entirely web views).
> You'll then have to convince Microsoft, Apple, Google, IBM RedHat, Canonical, the Debian project, and a few others, to actually package this VM with their OSs, so that users don't have to manually choose to install it.
I think this is the easy part. Everyone is already on board with webassembly. The hard part would be coming up with a common api which paves over all the platform idiosyncrasies in a way that feels good and native everywhere, and that developers actually want to use.
You'll then have to convince Microsoft, Apple, Google, IBM RedHat, Canonical, the Debian project, and a few others, to actually package this VM with their OSs, so that users don't have to manually choose to install it.
Then, you need to come up with some system of integrating this with, at a minimum, password managers, SAML and OAuth2, or you'll have something far less usable and secure than an equivalent web app. You'll probably have to integrate it with many more web technologies in fact, as people will eventually want to be able to show some web pages or web-formatted emails inside their apps.
So, my prediction is that any such effort will end-up reimplementing the browser, with little to no advantages when all is said and done.
Personally, I hate developing any web-like app. The GUI stack in particular is atrocious, with virtually no usable built-in controls, leading to a proliferation of toolkits and frameworks that do half the job and can't talk to each other. I'm hopeful that WASM will eventually allow more mature GUI frameworks to be used in web apps in a cross-platform manner, and we can forget about using a document markup language for designing application UIs. But otherwise, I think the web model is here to stay, and has in fact proven to be the most successful app ecosystem ever tried, by far (especially when counting the numerous iOS and Android apps that are entirely web views).