The UX .. killed it especially on desktop, we hit a huge number of problems and the choices we made designing the API that meant we couldn’t solve the UX issues without really changing the way we built the underlying API and by the time we realized this it was too late.
I mentioned web intents would be one of the most profound technologies for the web a few years ago. And then, it disappeared. I still think it will be exactly that when it’s revived, taking into account the lessons Paul outlines here.
In fact with the coming improvements slated for the browser, intents (aka iOS extensibility) actually stands out as one of the biggest native-web gaps of the short-term future web.
