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Apps Are Devouring the Open Web (businessinsider.com)
Rob Price, writing for Business Insider: Apps are eating the web. Over the past decade, there has been an inexorable movement from the open internet to the walled gardens of apps -- and this trend just hit a major milestone. According to new data from ComScore, more than half of all time Americans spend online is spent in apps -- up from around 41% two years ago. It's a stat that will be discomfiting to advocates of the open web, as well as companies whose core business is built around it -- notably Google. As content that was once freely available and indexable on websites becomes silo-ed away in closed-off apps, it makes it harder to search and link to content. This is, of course, the cornerstone of Google's original business.
... on the web then its probably still there. Any data & content specific to apps probably never made it to the web in the first place.
Whether walled gardens are good or bad is a big discussion, but from a technical point of the view the web is an utter dogs dinner with HTML, javascript, CSS and a host of other bits of glue keeping a website working along with bloated, buggy browsers and thats just the front end so I can understand from a *technical* point of view why some companies think "To hell with it, lets just write a client app in Obj-C, Java, C# and be done with it".
Really its just goint full circle back to the 80s and 90s when various bits of the internet were (and still are) accessed by seperate clients.
At what point does the browser become an app itself? Is a browser that doesn't ship with your device an app? Is an app that lets you view differing content on demand still an app?
Thirty four characters live here.
Nearly every large website have apps that are only thin web shell wrappers around their sites. And when you visit their sites you're constantly reminded about downloading their awesome apps. The reason for this is obvious - to avoid ad blocking. This is especially true on platforms where ad blockers are only available within the browser, which means all of iOS and also most Android devices that aren't rooted.
Invert this. Html is designed for all platforms. There is no need for micromanaged detail in an app, especially when apps are stupid and do not allow pinch zoom.
A return to 1990s web would be an improvement. Do you know why, youngster? Because a whole new generation of programmers is recreating stupid applications with all the old foibles from the 1980s intact.
In short, they are making the same dumb mistakes.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The "open web" only exists in your mind and a few sites that are user supported and don't take advertising - and it they have any sort of "social m" plugin, whether for likes, comments, sharing, or logging in, you're still being tracked, same as Slashdot enables Facebook. Google, etc to track you.
open, in the sense of transparency, is dead. You cannot even select whether you want these trackers served to you unless you use a 3rd party app that scrapes the site and doesn't download them in the first place. We need more apps like Simply Slashdot, that only grab the textual content you're interested in.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
We get these apps because the web is actually terrible for application development.
This is but one example. I could tell you dozens of similar idiocies with web app development.
I've done GUI development in wxWidgets, GTK, Qt and even Tcl/Tk. All of them have a more or less sane way of doing layouts or at the very least, some form of "stack all of these widgets vertically or horizontally and resize them according to some criteria (usually, a weight) when the containing widget resizes". We've had this for DECADES (tcl/tk has grid layout since 1995, IIRC). This is a solved problem.
But now, I've been roped into doing web development, and I hate it. You want to do something as simple as centring a div (vertically and horizontally) inside another div? Good luck. Want to have one one widget with a fixed width (say, 100px) next to one of a variable width (so that their combined widths fill the inside of the parent widget)? Good luck.
There is some CSS and HTML black magic that you must do for these simple things to work (or just do the calculations in javascript and resize everything manually, which is seriously error prone and defeats the whole purpose of CSS). And then you also need some hacks depending on the browsers, because despite the lies they tell you, rarely do web applications (or even static pages) work reliably between browsers (even within the same vendor).
Flex boxes ALMOST solve your problem, but true to form, the W3C also fucked that concept up. But, of course, this doesn't even phase "web developers", who have a simple solution for all of this: just figure out which resolutions your users are likely to use and optimize for that.
Sigh.
You had one job, appy app troll guy. You have failed! The one time your damn posts would have actually been close to topic. No, it's too late now.
What I hate more than Apps that access content that is also accessible via web sites are Web Sites that look and feel like Apps.
Or web sites that force me to load the mobile version (even after I several times manually fixed the URL), luckily there is a trick on Chrome at least to force them to deliver the desktop version.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
For years, companies wanted, but struggled, to generate revenue on the web. They couldn't. There was just too much friction for the average user in pulling out a credit card, typing in details, then remembering logins and logging in over and over again, not to mention tracking all of their subscriptions to various services.
Apps and in-app purchases are the "micropayments" that were talked about for so long. User provides billing information once, then is able to conveniently pay for content (whether the app or in-app purchases) with a tap or two. All payments and subscription information are centralized and run through a trusted (to the user) provider.
This is why companies have gone there. Because it's where they were finally able to generate sufficient user acquisitions to sustain an online purchase/subscription model, for the most part. Companies go where the money is, and it wasn't on the web.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW