Web APIs go through a standardization process and have multiple independent implementations. Can't say that about any operating system API except POSIX. Web pages from 30 years ago still load just fine - that's plenty stable. Third-party dependencies are an issue for all apps, not just the web.
Mobile gate-keepers historically do a pretty poor job and take a 30% cut for the privilege of denying your bugfix update. Can't recall the last time I had a misbehaving browser tab kill my phone's battery or harvest my contacts without consent; can't say the same about mobile apps.
At these levels of complexity, it’s impossible for these multiple independent implementations to be 100% compatible. As a programmer consuming an API, last thing I want is multiple incompatible implementations of that API.
> Web pages from 30 years ago still load just fine - that's plenty stable.
HTML as a document format is not an API, and is indeed pretty stable even over decades.
Modern SPA web apps don’t view HTML as a document markup language, instead they view HTML+CSS+JS as an API. Unlike HTML as a markup language, I don’t believe that API is stable.
> Third-party dependencies are an issue for all apps, not just the web.
With the exceptions of malware, anti-malware, and other questionable use cases, apps don’t usually download their third-party dependencies from third-party web sites each time they launch. Many web apps do.
> Can't recall the last time I had a misbehaving browser tab kill my phone's battery
Try a page that uses WebGL + web assembly.
> or harvest my contacts without consent
Very unfortunate indeed. I think that was an oversight of platform vendors. Instead of requiring user’s permissions to install apps, they should have given user choice to install the app but fake the APIs with dummy data: black frame for camera when denied, empty contact list for contacts when denied, and so on.
Mobile gate-keepers historically do a pretty poor job and take a 30% cut for the privilege of denying your bugfix update. Can't recall the last time I had a misbehaving browser tab kill my phone's battery or harvest my contacts without consent; can't say the same about mobile apps.