If you want to reach everyone who has a modern web browser or equivalent (modern web engines are in many devices now), then the rolling web standards party is the only "alternative tech" outside of native stacks.
Businesses that can afford to port or rewrite for every platform out there are rare. The web replaced Visual C++ / RogueWave windows apps for a reason.
Mobile pulls back toward per-OS apps, but only really to low degree: iOS for "elite consumers" (I didn't make that up), Android in several ways: native for games, some Java apps, and a long tail of PhoneGap-wrapped web apps.
Common among the mobile app approaches are web(view)-based apps and native apps. Emscripten/asm.js handles the latter by cross-compilation. The plugins escape valve for "alternative tech" is gone on mobile, so this is likely to be "it" for a while, IMHO.
The web+mobile composite is an ecosystem. Energy is never free, so apart from enthalpy beating entropy locally, tech that flows downhill usually wins with developers and publishers. Game devs/pubs porting their C++ catalogs to JS via Emscripten is an example of "flowing downhill".
What about opening files? The Web has lots of APIs, more all the time. Firefox OS has local storage, and it has only the web as its platform.
Businesses that can afford to port or rewrite for every platform out there are rare. The web replaced Visual C++ / RogueWave windows apps for a reason.
Mobile pulls back toward per-OS apps, but only really to low degree: iOS for "elite consumers" (I didn't make that up), Android in several ways: native for games, some Java apps, and a long tail of PhoneGap-wrapped web apps.
Common among the mobile app approaches are web(view)-based apps and native apps. Emscripten/asm.js handles the latter by cross-compilation. The plugins escape valve for "alternative tech" is gone on mobile, so this is likely to be "it" for a while, IMHO.
The web+mobile composite is an ecosystem. Energy is never free, so apart from enthalpy beating entropy locally, tech that flows downhill usually wins with developers and publishers. Game devs/pubs porting their C++ catalogs to JS via Emscripten is an example of "flowing downhill".
What about opening files? The Web has lots of APIs, more all the time. Firefox OS has local storage, and it has only the web as its platform.
/be