You might have hit on a solution here: Electron, or, ideally, a really nice mobile-first web browser with access to APIs provided by the underlying Linux OS.
I’m essentially imagining a phone OS that decouples the front-end and backend design. Implement the apps as APIs. Implement the UI using HTML5 so more designers can use their existing skills to contribute & the GUI layer can be replaced more easily. The experience would be a refinement of pulling a Docker image and opening a browser to use it on localhost.
Edit: a mobile OS also needs a really nice mobile-first shell app. People do so much with text messaging now that I think they might be open to it…
There's a prior attempt in the form of Firefox OS, which tried to push the “Web technology as driver of local UI” thing. Some cursory looking around suggests that webOS may also have done this, but I'm not as sure (it would make sense from the name).
I’m essentially imagining a phone OS that decouples the front-end and backend design. Implement the apps as APIs. Implement the UI using HTML5 so more designers can use their existing skills to contribute & the GUI layer can be replaced more easily. The experience would be a refinement of pulling a Docker image and opening a browser to use it on localhost.
Edit: a mobile OS also needs a really nice mobile-first shell app. People do so much with text messaging now that I think they might be open to it…