Jimmy Wales Declares App Store Models a Threat

An anonymous reader writes "Wikipedia's chief says models such as the App Store on the iPad are not only a dangerous chokepoint to internet freedom, but that this is a real and immediate problem that's of more concern than the overblown what if's of the net neutrality debate."

Comments

Ugh

[Anrego]

I’m personally not a fan of the whole “app” thing. Feels like we are going backwards.

You had specialized viewers and clients for various data, then gradually the web became more mature and more and more data was simply put on a website. Now we are gradually going back to the specialized viewer mentality.

OS integration and a few features like GPS and multi-touch are one justification, and there are certainly cases where it does make sense to have a specialized client vice a web app to view content from the web, however I think a lot of it has to do with money.

You can’t sell a subscription to a website (unless you’ve got some really damn good content), but you can sell a little app that pulls data off your website and displays it in a different manner.

We had a shitty but effective standard going here.. and I fear this whole “app” craze is going to put us back in the “dark ages”.

Re:Ugh

[drinkypoo]

We had a shitty but effective standard going here.. and I fear this whole “app” craze is going to put us back in the “dark ages”.

Give a little more time for HTML5 to become common, and you'll see whole sites popping up to provide web-delivered "Apps" which cache and remain local via HTML5. People are still getting a handle on it. There's loads of apps which are so simple they can be replaced in this way.

Hopefully as HTML continues to add in features, more and more of the lame apps will disappear and be replaced. But apps offer persistence; you don't have to reload them every time you want to use them. Again, you can offer this through HTML5, but developers don't know or aren't interested (yet!) in replacing their apps with non-App versions because they like to get paid. Someone will eventually do it just for giggles, though. And many of the apps are already available on this basis, but usually not cached.

You can’t sell a subscription to a website (unless you’ve got some really damn good content), but you can sell a little app that pulls data off your website and displays it in a different manner.

And if it adds substantial value then it will be used. And if it doesn't then someone else will come along and offer a website that works without your app and eat your lunch.

Re:Ugh

[drinkypoo]

and I fear this whole “app” craze is going to put us back in the “dark ages”.

On the other hand, since we're going this direction and the users like it, that means there is a widespread problem with the traditional way of thinking and marketing software.

It's worth mentioning that Ubuntu offers an "App Store" sort of experience for Free and free software downloads through the Software Center, and that users cite the ease of software management in modern Linux distributions (which substantially predates Ubuntu) as one of the features that they find indispensable. It certainly beats the hell out of having update processes running on my machine from Oracle, DVDFab, Adobe, Microsoft, et cetera. To me, this is just the world cashing in on what the nerds figured out.

Re:Ugh

[jollyreaper]

I'm personally not a fan of the whole "app" thing. Feels like we are going backwards.

You had specialized viewers and clients for various data, then gradually the web became more mature and more and more data was simply put on a website. Now we are gradually going back to the specialized viewer mentality.

I'd like to think that the whole app thing is a short-term phenomenon that will die out.

Why the specialized apps versus web pages? I haven't taken a look at the traffic but I would suspect that it takes less bandwidth to populate the data in an app that's running natively on a handheld than it does to fill a web browser. You have to feed it not just the data but the design info on every page load. Reading message boards on an iphone is ok but highly interactive stuff like a facebook runs more smoothly with the app versus doing it in safari.

I look back at the early webmail examples and they were dreadful. The early hotmail was an exercise in tedium and I asked why anybody would want to use that over a nice, native mail client. Fast-forward to today and something like gmail is a breeze to use and offline mail applications seem archaic in comparison. As another comparison, my very first experience with electronic banking involved a proprietary application installed from floppies that required dialup access to the main bank. And this was right at the cusp of the internet becoming big-time. It was a tremendous pain in the ass to use and proper internet banking with nothing more than a mainstream browser was a whole new world of practicality and convenience.

I think there's plenty of room for apps that really need to be apps, things that are really programs. But stuff that should really just be a webpage should be done in web pages. I think it's just a matter of the technology maturing a little more. Early hotmail sucked, current gmail is great. In another five years we'll see people extolling the virtues of the next twist on html5 that will save us from the horror of the customized app store. And then someone will talk about the era of the thin-client finally being at hand.

Of course, there's also the school of thought that says the app store concept is a way of putting the toothpaste back in the tube, trying to lock things down so corporations can go back to making money hand over claw. We'll see.

Re:Ugh

[drinkypoo]

You're right, but on the other hand Ubuntu will run on almost any hardware. Can you say that about any "app"?

Android on x86 is getting better all the time, and it's only a matter of time before it is credible. So sure, Android apps will run pretty much anywhere soon enough.