Comment by sinuhe69
7 years ago
To be frank, I don’t see the benefit of convergence. Admittedly, one code base is cool and convenient, sure but if one considers the additional cost of design, maintenance and the loss of the optimal user experience, I think convergence is rather a minus. A small touch screen requires a totally different convention of user interactions as a big screen with only mouse and keyboard support. It’s simply the reality.
Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel (admittedly a new and shiny one), why don’t we just stick to the well proven approaches and design different UIs and front ends for different platforms? The bulk of the codes would go into the common business/security layers anyway. With CI/CD, each user would have his/her app with the same functionality but different UI for the optimal user experience without much headaches or additional burden.
> I don’t see the benefit of convergence.
To me the benefit is not to have a single application that works both with a touch screen and a mouse/keyboard. Rather, the benefit is to have a single filesystem that I can access with both touch screen apps and mouse/keyboard apps. This way I could for example create a grocery with a mouse/keyboard, then take my phone and check items off with a touchscreen. There are lots of things we rely on the cloud for that would be better served by a "convergent" environment imo.
I use Syncthing right now to achieve the effect of having a shared file-system across all my devices. It works really well and since it doesn't rely on any sort of cloud or client-server architecture it even works offline if you're on the same network.
https://syncthing.net/
Lol. And this pipe dream of magically converting apps to phone doesn't even address this use case of sharing the data. They assume the linux applications will be cloud locked-in like traditional ios/android apps.