Does Apple—and the rest of the WebKit community—have the skill and capacity to continue to drive WebKit forward at a pace that matches Google’s grand plans for Blink? The easy answer is, “Of course it does! Apple created the WebKit project, and it got along fine before Google started contributing.” But I look at those graphs and wonder.

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This all sounds great on paper, but in (several years of) practice, Google’s Chrome has proven to be far more stable and resilient in the face of misbehaving web pages than Apple’s WebKit2-based Safari. I run both browsers all day, and a week rarely goes by where I don’t find myself facing the dreaded “Webpages are not responding” dialog in Safari that invites me to reload every single open tab to resume normal operation.

So what’s the proper response? Obviously: don’t write apps for sale in the App Store anymore. This has already happened. But it hasn’t manifested itself as a mass migration off the iOS platform (what, like Android users are any more willing to pay for apps?), but instead a migration into what one article (that I can’t find!) called the “middle class of developers making apps for corporate clients”.

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True story: I was going over a GUI design for a client’s Mac app in a group chat and I said “man, I’d love a touch version of this on an iPad.” The client said they’d love to do it, but could never charge enough on the iPad to cover the development costs.

Think about that for a second. With 100 million iPads sold since 2010, versus a Mac installed base of about 60 million, the iPad market is nearly twice as large, yet cannot justify development or even porting.

As long as you have your client configured to cache a local copy of all messages and to delete messages on the server when you delete them locally, you maintain just as much control over your email as you do with POP. Most of the old assumptions that led users to favor POP — such as the expectation that a person will use a single computer for email most of the time, and the belief that online storage is expensive — are no longer valid in today’s world.