I've spent the last 8 months working on my own stuff. Before that I worked primarily as a backend engineer. My UI experience was limited. I did see the need for the skills.
I also believe that there should be at least a strong mobile offering with any web application now-a-days. That said, here's my thought on the matter.
UI sucks for everything. It really seems to have always sucked and probably will continue to suck. Swing is a pain to develop. WinForms too. I assume from looking at Cocoa code, so is Apple.
I've been working on a Pomodoro app during this whole time. Just getting lists to work efficiently in Android is a bitch. You have to serialize objects in and out of view items to make sure scrolling doesn't absolutely crap out when you've got a lot of items. Even with Swift, the same is fundamentally true in iOS.
Making a native app that looks 1) unique and 2) nice is terrible. You have to have a team with a designer and developer. Anything less and you're going to be out of the market longer. Making a native app that meets the two criteria above on multiple platforms is incredibly time consuming.
So I've now decided to use Ionic + Angularjs + Cordova. I've been on that platform for 2 weeks now. In that time, I've learned Web SQL, Angularjs, Ionic and enough Cordova to get plugins installed. I am also further along than I ever was in my Android development. It even looks pretty using the default Ionic styling (I got a free UI team by using their stuff).
So even if I accept your speculation that apps will dominate the world. I assume it will be developed on an HTML5 or HTML* stack. That does require "interoperable universal interaction standards".
I'll continue this speculation to say that I think the appearance of apps will merge. There is little reason to have a brand for Android and a brand for iOS and a brand for Tizen, etc. Ionic apps look like Ionic apps without having to spend a lot of GUI logic saying stupid things like, If Android, put the tabs on the top. Again, you need a common standard for this type of design and that is HTML.
P.S.
I know that games will suck in JS in the browser view. I know that JS has some serious issues with performance that will probably not be overcome for sometime. I've seen that analysis blog post too. But for CRUD apps like the Pomodoro or Foursquare or LinkedIn, Ionic and its ilk are perfect. The reason is, to beat the horse, is because of advancing open, compliant standards. CSS animations can now be hardware accelerated. JS performance is constantly improving (even if it is a horrible, horrible language).HTML is being banged out to house newer features. This isn't a polemic about how native has no values. It's a polemic against the idea that CRUD apps should have gone native.
I also believe that there should be at least a strong mobile offering with any web application now-a-days. That said, here's my thought on the matter.
UI sucks for everything. It really seems to have always sucked and probably will continue to suck. Swing is a pain to develop. WinForms too. I assume from looking at Cocoa code, so is Apple.
I've been working on a Pomodoro app during this whole time. Just getting lists to work efficiently in Android is a bitch. You have to serialize objects in and out of view items to make sure scrolling doesn't absolutely crap out when you've got a lot of items. Even with Swift, the same is fundamentally true in iOS.
Making a native app that looks 1) unique and 2) nice is terrible. You have to have a team with a designer and developer. Anything less and you're going to be out of the market longer. Making a native app that meets the two criteria above on multiple platforms is incredibly time consuming.
So I've now decided to use Ionic + Angularjs + Cordova. I've been on that platform for 2 weeks now. In that time, I've learned Web SQL, Angularjs, Ionic and enough Cordova to get plugins installed. I am also further along than I ever was in my Android development. It even looks pretty using the default Ionic styling (I got a free UI team by using their stuff).
So even if I accept your speculation that apps will dominate the world. I assume it will be developed on an HTML5 or HTML* stack. That does require "interoperable universal interaction standards".
I'll continue this speculation to say that I think the appearance of apps will merge. There is little reason to have a brand for Android and a brand for iOS and a brand for Tizen, etc. Ionic apps look like Ionic apps without having to spend a lot of GUI logic saying stupid things like, If Android, put the tabs on the top. Again, you need a common standard for this type of design and that is HTML.
P.S. I know that games will suck in JS in the browser view. I know that JS has some serious issues with performance that will probably not be overcome for sometime. I've seen that analysis blog post too. But for CRUD apps like the Pomodoro or Foursquare or LinkedIn, Ionic and its ilk are perfect. The reason is, to beat the horse, is because of advancing open, compliant standards. CSS animations can now be hardware accelerated. JS performance is constantly improving (even if it is a horrible, horrible language).HTML is being banged out to house newer features. This isn't a polemic about how native has no values. It's a polemic against the idea that CRUD apps should have gone native.