Nothing new, the trend is already apparent. What this author is talking about in an unsophisticated way are Progressive Web Apps. Twitter, FT and others are already pure web apps. The future is definitely in the browser but Apple is withholding a lot of innovation by not giving the browser as many rights and access as i.e. Chrome does (Bluetooth, GPS, etc.)

Maybe more smaller digital companies could thrive. Maybe our digital services would be cheaper and better. Maybe we’d have more than two dominant smartphone systems. Or maybe it would be terrible. We don’t know because we’ve mostly lived with unquestioned smartphone app dominance.

But web browsers have become more capable, and cloud computing now enables a lot of sophisticated stuff to happen off the physical phone.

I first became interested in this topic because Aram Zucker-Scharff, who helps oversee digital advertising technology at The Washington Post, has been tweeting for years arguing that apps were a mistake and it’s time to move most of our smartphone activity to increasingly sophisticated mobile websites.