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The App Store was always a walled garden with notably tall walls. The power Apple has over who gets into the App Store has been described as the primary virtue
by cdata 6y ago
The App Store was always a walled garden with notably tall walls. The power Apple has over who gets into the App Store has been described as the primary virtue and attraction of iOS devices for years. Users love that it is a curated collection with a very high bar for quality, and many are willing to accept the trade-off that not all apps (even technically legitimate ones) will be published there.
This is why the web is so important. More to the topic at hand: this is why Apple purposely, broadly second-classing the web on iOS is so important, and needs to stop.
On Android, a directory-style app would be trivial to distribute on the web as an installable PWA that eventually becomes indistinguishable from a native app from the user's perspective. It's 2020; this is a sub-basement level of capability that all platforms should include by now. Let's stop pretending that ceding all the publishing power to one company is a trade-off that makes sense in the long-run (this goes for Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and all the rest).
- rimliu 6y agoHave you seen the web lately?
- cdata 6y agoIf you don't like the web, nobody is forcing you to use it. But, your decision not to use it shouldn't come at the cost of someone else's freedom to distribute legitimate software or creative works to those users who seek it out. Speaking for myself, most of the "apps" I use on my phone and desktop on a daily basis are PWAs, and they are generally indistinguishable from the native apps I use in terms of quality.
- mytherin 6y agoI don't think the above poster was critiquing the quality of the web, but rather stating that the web has the same problem of generally being consolidated into the hands of a few big players (Google/Facebook). If you make a website and Google decides to remove you from their search index for whatever reason, the financial effects on most companies would also be disastrous. Perhaps even comparable to being removed from the App Store.
- true_religion 6y agoGoogle is basically providing free advertising. If they remove you, then you can just use paid advertising. There are many verticals in which Google cannot drive traffic to anyone except the top players, so everyone not in the top 10 uses other means. Being in the top index, is a perk of being already being famous and successful.