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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.
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.
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.
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
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
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).