> I think in fact a lot of people do want them to do this.
I, the engineer, do not want them to do this. Before Google and Apple, I didn't have this problem. I didn't have to pay their tax or march to their beat.
You might argue that it's their platform and that's the cost for us to pay. But it wasn't always this way! These companies leveraged their advantages to steal eyeballs away from an open web and lock them in their own platform.
They could have spent money making the open web work better on mobile. Or designing a portable app framework and runtime for all devices. But we know why they didn't and what the outcome has been.
I want them to pay back the negative externalities they've leveraged onto us.
Well, at the same time users had to deal with adware, viruses, etc.
Your needs as a developer don’t trump users needs.
They could have spent money making the open web work better on mobile. Or designing a portable app framework and runtime for all devices. But we know why they didn't and what the outcome has been.
And write once run everywhere worked so well with Java applets.
> Before Google and Apple, I didn't have this problem. I didn't have to pay their tax or march to their beat.
You still don't! You don't have the play by their rules, and you can still target everyone who has a non-Google or non-Apple phone, which as a target market is appreciably no one, much as it was before Google and Apple entered the phone market.
You can target them if they have phones produced by your hated manufacturers anyway by making your app a webapp instead of a native app.
You don't want to do those things, and that's fine, but you're yearning to go back to a time that never existed.
Personal PCs were just this back in the 90's and 00's. Microsoft tried to create a walled garden, but it failed due to the world wide web.
Google and Apple saw how Microsoft failed and decided that the app store would be a first class citizen on day one and that the mobile web [1] would be an afterthought. They learned from Microsoft's mistake and used their positions to make app stores the new status quo.
It could have easily gone a different way, but I understand how the business interests got us to where we are.
[1] the mobile web wouldn't have been nice without more money and research poured into it. The web stack could have been supplemented or a new one could have been developed. These companies obviously had other priorities than to pay for something that netted them nothing, but individual developers wound out worse for it.
Actually, you've got that history a little backward. The original iPhone had no App Store and had only web apps; that was the promoted way to develop for the platform. It was only after the phone's release and the mad clamor from developers to be allowed to develop native applications that an SDK was released and the App Store created.
I think you are accidentally retconning current status quo onto the past - early mobile internet was terrible, low bandwidth enough that mobile was about /fitting/ the page down the pipe instead of user interface, and also expensive with far lesser adoption such that wifi-only tablets/PDAs were more of a thing.
Google still has complete control over how well your web app is ranked in search results and they change rules and criteria all of the time, sometimes with little notice. Google search console is infuriatingly vague. Google is inescapable and opaque and I’m glad politicians are finally seeing these entities as monopoly powers that need to be addressed. They have a monopoly market share in web search and mobile devices so how is anyone supposed to NOT play by their rules?
You seriously overestimate their both their automated and manual control if you think they are capable of passive aggressive actions to non-entities. They closest they can come is hiding autosuggest when too many people complain or it becomes too sensitive like say "Ted Cruz Zodiac Killer".
Their SERPS will only return quotes on toxic MASCULINITY.
Do the same thing in Yandex and they'll give you the correct results. Google uses AI to identify "non-PC sites" and push them down in the SERPS.
Please, you engineer, do your best to make the app usable from a browser.
I dislike apps. Sometimes they make sense. Fine.
Often, they do not, or offer less functionality than PC or web does.
If you need payment, make that easy, same. Cancel easy too. Just because that is nice, and we all could use nice. You like nice, I like nice. Let us be nice.
If you need profanity, whatever, I get it. Let's be adults.
I don't like the gate keepers and do not trust them. I do not expect you to trust me, nor you me.
Clean, open, portable web for both of us as much as can be managed.
I support you, you support me, us.
I can be a user on linux, android, iOS, Windows, BSD, whatever I can get on the web.
Sometimes dependent stuff is needed for the job. I get it. Please try to avoid that stuff, and I will try and run more relevant systems.
:D
I really do avoid apps, really do try and be a good user, really do prefer web and really do run a bunch of OSes.
We both are rare. I do advocacy every chance I get. Maybe you can too.
Stick together in a figurative sense.
My development is small, embedded systems and or specific purpose programs. Enough to get the engineer speaking here.
Hopefully, you are a user enough to do similar things.
I happen to prefer the exactly opposite - I don't want to run the browser (or a browser-wrapper), I want app to be native.
<rant>Websites lack solid, consistent and platform-native look-and-feel. They are always limited, they aren't integrated with the operating system (i.e. task switcher), they are slow on almost anything (because modern web browsers are ugly giant behemoths. I've recently built myself a very beefy machine (16-core CPU, 128GiB RAM) and even now _sometimes_ sites are still choppy. On mobile, lots of sites are performing poorly.</rant>
For me, on mobile, it takes a LOT to bother with an app. Any alternative, even close to reasonable, gets the nod every time.
On a PC, this is less of an issue. Applications will often have great, or superior functionality. No worries.
On mobile? No. The opposite is nearly always true.
Should have been clear.
As for solid platform look and feel... depends there too. If the UX is really optimized for the task, I will take it. Have used so many now. Almost non issue there.
Generally I dislike app stores. This favors PC too.
Perhaps the best features about the web, though, are the share-centric nature of being able to pass around a link, the control we have over the client, and the distribution of apps and info that's least encumbered by gatekeepers.
For example, let's go all the way to the other end of the spectrum where the web as we know it didn't take off and everything was siloed into native apps that you had to download from the App Store before trying something new.
That seems pretty grim to me. I think we're in a sweet spot and lucky to have both.
That's the problem with targeting the lowest common denominator. Since that LCD is mindless consumption, that's what the ecosystem evolves to. If you have stuff to actually do, you're increasingly out of luck.
But they're not equal citizens on mobile devices. Web often feels sluggish on mobile, and it doesn't have the same access to device and hardware APIs, nor does it allow low-level control of concurrency and allocation. (I don't want to get off topic about HTML/JS. It does a lot of jobs well.)
There could have been an open, cross-platform native app stack if Apple and Google and a consortium of other companies had joined forces and made it so. There's no technical reason preventing this. The economic incentives got us to where we are.
Devices should be easy to target. There should be the option to use multiple app stores right off the bat, and you shouldn't have to bundle to get access to Gmail. Or even better - point your browser at gmail.com and get the native app installed on your mobile device. Distributed updates from gmail.com sans app store. The OS would still control permissions and guard against malicious apps.
The world wide web era was truly unique and special, and it's a shame the same principles didn't carry into the mobile world.
> There's no technical reason preventing this. The economic incentives got us to where we are.
What's the difference? There's also no technical reason preventing you from developing your own cross-platform native app stack that beats Apple's and Google's with no conceivable return on investment, constant PR disasters, and time-consuming negotiation with bad-faith or incompetent partners. The forces that stop you are mostly economic.
You can do all of that, just download the apk. What you seem to want is that app stores should be forced to accept any apps?
The rest is just saudosistic nostalgia. There wasn't mass access to the internet, you're just missing the times when a small elite had access to the internet.
There was open access to the internet when aol started giving away cd-roms. Rich and poor, educated and less educated roamed different sites often clashing.
The interest wasn't massive because things were not super easy. Phones bridged the gap.
Fast forward to today you have less choice but bigger buy buttons.
You seem to have a mental image of the internet that doesn't correspond to reality. Poor didn't have access, they couldn't afford a computer, much less an internet plan.
> Poor didn't have access, they couldn't afford a computer, much less an internet plan. Step out of the Hacker News bubble for a bit.
I was very, very poor. So were most of the kids I grew up with. Most of us couldn't afford new computers; that's true. So we bought old ones. My father - tears in his eyes - lugged in something ancient that he'd picked up for $50, having no idea how to use it but hoping that putting it in front me would do me some good. AOL had been mailing everyone in town (Detroit). Some kids got PCs from the nearby churches, some got them from the school (others still only ever used them in school). We collected and hoarded the access disks, and would go ringing each others' phones or knocking down doors to share websites we'd found. Imagine my embarrassment when I realized the AOL search results page was not the entire internet, and that I could click on any text with a blue outline.
> doesn't correspond to reality
I know there are people who managed (or didn't..) to grow up poorer than I did. But even poverty is a spectrum.
I am aware of this, anticipated this response from you (as you’ve repeated in this thread), and addressed it at the end of the comment you’re replying to. I do not believe that a global perspective diminishes the argument in any way.
Given the nature of your position it feels ironic to be saying to you that if you feel my family was amongst the worlds’ “elite” just because we lived in the US, then I believe you may need a more nuanced outlook on people. Also, there’s a tent-city of people outside my building who’d like a word with you.
I’m not though, and I have already said so. My original “poverty is a spectrum” comment still firmly addresses everything you’ve said, so if we still disagree, we can agree that’s ok.
The implication of “Consumers are far better now than they were” is that they are better, because of the App Store. This is false, completely illogical, and a straw man argument (as no one suggest users of tech have it worse in 2019 then 2005). Consumers are better off now, because technology has gotten better, not because App Stores have made things better. App Stores have actively caused harm to the consumers through lock in and through a compression of imagination amongst end users of how much better things could be.
You’re also factually incorrect about “a small elite had access to the internet”. That may have been true in the 80s, but by 2000 usage was at 50% and climbed to 75% by 2010. I mean the dot com boom was predicated on wide user adoption, so I don’t even know why you would even think that stat made inuitive sense.
> The implication of “Consumers are far better now than they were” is that they are better, because of the App Store. This is false, completely illogical, and a straw man argument (as no one suggest users of tech have it worse in 2019 then 2005).
No, it isn't false. Buying and/or installing an app today is orders of magnitude easier, safer and cheaper than 2005.
You clearly don't like it, and you probably are part of the little elite that had access to the internet before the general public did.
You can still do online everything that you used to in 2005, nothing was removed.
> That may have been true in the 80s, but by 2000 usage was at 50% and climbed to 75% by 2010.
Sorry the break the news to you, but the US isn't the world.
Maybe you should step out of the hacker news bubble for a minute.
Your premise is sound. But it's in your conclusion that you miss the point. The point is its not 2005 anymore. Today, if Google didn't do it, someone else will and can. Except that a certain brand of monopolies set things up in a way that a rather worrying number of people think that without these monopolies there's no other choice. You think that it's Google that's enabled and empowered all of us. That, my friend, is where you are wrong.
To be fair, complain about your family, not the desktop model. Its like babyproofing, the equivalent of no one beeing allowed to buy a steakknife because some people are not grown up enough to handle one carefully.
edit: Its ofcourse a difficult subject, like with your parents getting too old to drive and not recognizing it, but after all not a technical but a societal problem.
From talks with colleagues I concluded that these issues were widespread enough to conclude that problem was not my family but the desktop distribution model.
Its definitely widespread, I didnt want to imply it was just your family. There is a large group that cant handle admin rights responsibly. I just dont think general restrictions are in order here. We should much rather educate this group instead of giving up ownership over our devices. Especially since we dont have the appstore model out of security considerations, but because monopolists want to keep people in walled gardens. Ownership of your device is to great of a good to give it up in the name of security.
Yes, and its super hard now. When I installed the new android version the only way I could get fdroid installed was flashing it as a system app in the recovery.
Last time I did a fresh install of Windows 10 Home I had to go into Apps & features and disable "Allow apps from the Store only" in order to install Chrome. Didn't seem to have to do that on Windows 10 Pro.
I, the engineer, do not want them to do this. Before Google and Apple, I didn't have this problem. I didn't have to pay their tax or march to their beat.
You might argue that it's their platform and that's the cost for us to pay. But it wasn't always this way! These companies leveraged their advantages to steal eyeballs away from an open web and lock them in their own platform.
They could have spent money making the open web work better on mobile. Or designing a portable app framework and runtime for all devices. But we know why they didn't and what the outcome has been.
I want them to pay back the negative externalities they've leveraged onto us.