And unfortunately, every system had their own way. Native development has suffered for decades from stubborn OS vendors who are incentivized against portability and cross-platform interoperability. Everyone's "way" was different and required you to rewrite your application to support it. I always wonder, if the web never took off as the common platform, would we today have better cross-platform native tools and APIs? I guess we'll never know.
Yes, but in fairness if operating systems don't differ then what's the point in having them.
This is the "what killed [os] innovation" problem: if nobody is writing native apps then there's no incentive to add new capabilities to your OS.
What's really needed here is a platform with the same advantages as the web, but which makes it much easier for OS vendors to expose proprietary capabilities. Then you will get innovation. Once browser makers killed off plugins it was over for desktop operating systems as outside of gaming (where innovation continues apace), there was no way to let devs write 90% cross platform code whilst still using the 10% special sauce.
