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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.
Really. Discomfiting. That just ...
Sigh.
On topic, how much of this information is actually siloed away, and how many of these apps are just a browser wrapper a la the Facebook app?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
... 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.
Index-ability is not the issue. The issue is we have managed to take a decentralized Internet, where govt has been forced to adapt its ideas toward freedom due to the infeasibility of endorcing their usual anti-freedom views on their role in speech, commerce, etc, and say: no thank you, I would like to interact with the internet via apps from 5 govt-partnered large corporations.
I know! Let's have the FCC create a new rule banning such apps. In the name of "net neutrality" or some kind of "equality".
And we'll denounce those opposing such a rule as being a corporate whore and a crazy Libertarian.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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.
That article would be a lot more useful if they had broken down exactly which apps are responsible for the majority of the traffic. I suspect that just a handful dominate, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. In assessing the seriousness of the threat, or assessing if there is one, It would be helpful to know who has what market share.
> A return to 1990s web would be an improvement.
like this motherf*cking website
Lock Screens are eating the web. Over the past decade, there has been an inexorable movement from the open internet to the Lock Screen -- and this trend just hit a major milestone. According to data from common sense, more than half of all time Americans spend with their phone it is on the Lock Screen.
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.
It's okay to say "fuck" on Slashdot.
But they are right, and contrary to what they say, they put it rather well. Anybody can still put up a web page. In that fashion the internet is still wide open.
And Slashdot should take the hint. I can't zoom in the page without the damn text spilling off the side, forcing the need to scroll horizontally. What's up with that? Why can't everybody use plain old HTML?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
The number of people on the Internet has grown hugely. If half of them remain surfing actual websites, that's still a huge number of people. The web is fine. Apps have appeared. Some people use them. Meh. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Mod parent up.
Web apps IMO are a near-complete failure from both a development and user perspective, and it's this failure that has caused the rise of apps:
Those are just some examples of the problems with web applications. Anything beyond the most simple sorts of applications is difficult and expensive to do, with limited performance.
Now where the web can really shine is for REST-style data services. Put the business logic on a server (or set of servers) somewhere, do major processing on the backend, and pass data back and forth statelessly over HTTP. The web is great for that. Or for rendering things that are actually documents. But as a UI system for applications the web has failed big time -- even Google produces a number of native apps to get around the web's serious limitations.
Yaz
I agree that having an app for banking is if not stupid at least restricting your ability to do banking from the device of your choice.
Other than through an app that can access a device's rear camera, how else is the banking interface supposed to scan the front and back of a paper check in order to deposit it to your account? I occasionally receive personal checks from family members not technically inclined enough to set up PayPal, and for years, I received payroll checks from an employer that was for some reason incapable of direct deposit. Or are you instead recommending biking to an ATM that takes deposits?
I can't draw a circle these days because it takes 8 pages of boilerplate copied from Stack Overflow, 3 frameworks, 5 template languages, a JSON definition, 2 serialization layers, a virtualization layer and p-code transforms for optimal runtime.
And a partridge in a pear tree
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
I agree that the web is pretty much a huge mess, but I just want to address one thing:
- JavaScript. Single threaded and garbage collected.
I think Web Workers allow you to write multi-threaded JavaScript--with, of course, limitations (e.g., no shared memory).