11 ms·

When iPhone and Android hit the scene the 'rich' web experience was primarily flash, silverlight, and some java applets (taking their last breathe). Input APIs

• wiz21c 5y ago
  > content addressibility I'd say the app ecosystem promotes closed content whereas WWW promotes open content.
  • adventured 5y ago
    What open content? Wikipedia? That's <1% of the Web. If we're judging whether the Web promotes open content by the actual results after three decades, the exact opposite is the case: the Web promotes closed content. Netflix, ESPN, Google/Gmail/Maps/News/etc, Microsoft/Bing/Office/mail/etc, NYTimes, Washington Post, USA Today, MSNBC, CNBC, Reuters, AP, CNN, Bloomberg, FoxNews, ABC, CBS, NBC, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Imgur, eBay, Amazon/Twitch/Prime/etc, Target, Walmart, ETSY, Disney, Viacom, Verizon/Yahoo, Match.com, Quora, PayPal. Along with pretty much all corporate sites and porn sites. Most blogs are privately owned, copyrighted; same with substacks; same with most mailing lists. Most photography on the Web is owned by someone, and captive on a platform. Travel sites/services (Booking, Expedia, etc), review sites/services (Yelp, Trip Advisor, most cooking sites, etc), weather sites, real-estate sites (Realtor.com, Zillow, Apartments.com, etc); ticket sites (Vivid, Stubhub, Ticketmaster, Live Nation) - they're largely in the same box, they're all privately owned, copyrighted content, closed corporate platforms. Now keep going with that list for most of the next 5,000+ largest sites (with few exceptions like Wikipedia or Stack Exchange). Nearly everything on the Web is centralized, closed, privately owned, copyrighted content and or platforms. They're all little walled gardens.
    • nsonha 5y ago
      uhm... everything? "open" as in anyone can make a website and if it's has one good article, it will show up in some google query's result.
      • Razengan 5y ago
        > "open" as in anyone can make a website Anyone can make an app too. > if it's has one good article, it will show up in some google query's result. Maybe buried deep in the 100th page, but not the front.
        • nsonha 5y ago
          > Anyone can make an app too. After they install some bloated IDE, learn some "tech", and pay the gatekeepers > Maybe buried deep in the 100th page But they can be found and share, as opposed to apps of a non existent category where average people publish what they are working on, their thoughts, or whatever. App Store and Google Play search would crumble at the scale of the number of websites in existence right now (~2 billions). Remember that search engines index what's inside those websites too not just their name and description.
          • Razengan 5y ago
            > After they install some bloated IDE, learn some "tech", and pay the gatekeepers Tell me how making and hosting a website is absolutely free.
            • nsonha 5y ago
              You could not make this argument even 10 years ago, when you could absolutely make a sites on any of wordpress, tumblr, yahoo or blogspot completely free. These days there are even more choices ranging from WYCIWYG (Squarespace & the like) to absolutely free full CI/CD-ed platforms (heroku, Zeit, GitHub pages...). It's not like there is a duopoly on web hosting.
            • 5y ago
  • judge2020 5y ago
    The app ecosystem promotes closed content only because it requires native code to run for the UX people expect on mobile, at least until recently with responsive UIs dominating the web framework space.
• mattlondon 5y ago
  > The real question is how did the web remain relevant while being so far behind this tectonic platform shift? We didn't all shift to to smartphones the instant they became available. It took a while for people to transition to smartphones. Likewise getting an app up and running (in addition to their websites) took time for most businesses, and many probably waited before jumping on the band wagon I am sure everyone on HN moved quickly, but for the rest of the non-tech world I am sure they were doing just fine using their home computer for several more years. Even now, I still think "I'll wait and do this on a proper computer". It's not like apps have solved all computing-ills - many are total garbage with bugs and/or poorly thought through designs.
  • gsich 5y ago
    What transition? Mobile is the lite version.
  • quaintdev 5y ago
    > I am sure everyone on HN moved quickly, but for the rest of the non-tech world I am sure they were doing just fine using their home computer for several more years. A whole generation of people in India never used Computers as the western population did but large majority of same people directly moved to smartphones.
  • SiVal 5y ago
    "I am sure everyone on HN moved [from computers to smartphones] quickly" I may be wrong, but I suspect you have that backwards. My guess is that at least older HNers were slower to shift from powerful but complex creation tools (computers) to easy consumption toys (smartphones) designed for consumers who found computers with files and folders just too darned complicated to use. Until good, portable mapping and good-enough cameras came along, I had no use for the "smart" features of a phone that were vastly inferior to the smart features of a real computer. For a long time, all I needed from a phone was the phone, which a small flip phone handled just fine. For anything "smart", I used the laptop & real camera in my backpack.
    • mumblemumble 5y ago
• beefield 5y ago
  > The real question is how did the web remain relevant while being so far behind this tectonic platform shift? Not sure it is relevant anymore for a non-trivial chunk of people - at least in mobile. Lately I have quite often needed to explain about a good web app accessible in browser but not in app store. And I am a bit bewildered. The amount of people pretty much unable to distinguish between browser, app store and url is... not too small. (And don't get me started about iphone users' understanding why their location services "do not work" in safari. I assume there is a difference in default permissions there between iphone and abdroid there)
  • jeroenhd 5y ago
    I don't have an iPhone, can you expand on that location services part? Does Safari not show the permission popup when a website asks for it or something? On Android, websites can request location permissions, you can't access any of that stuff by default.
    • jonnycomputer 5y ago
      Not sure what op meant, but most computers don't come with built in GPS. Location services rely on other indicators of location, which are far less precise.
      • kps 5y ago
        Firefox lets you specify your location, though not easily. (Set `geo.provider.network.url` to `data:application/json,{"location":{"lat":0.00000,"lng":0.00000},"accuracy":1000}`.) Chrome doesn't, so even sites with location permission place me at my ISP's HQ 500 miles away.
    • beefield 5y ago
      I do not have iphone either, but based on my observations many (most?) iphone owners have disabled safari location services from the os side, so you can't just allow them from the permission popup, but you need to go to the os settings and enable them for safari before you can bypass the permission popup. Again, I do not own an iphone, so not sure if it is exactly like this, but something like that needs to be done in many iohones trying to access location data from safari.
• mistrial9 5y ago
  > The real question is how did the web remain relevant while being so far behind this tectonic platform shift? this is an "apples vs oranges" question
• pier25 5y ago
  Even today, in the year 2021, browsers do not have native support for gestures which are ubiquitous in the touch screen world. To pan/pinch/swipe you either need to implement it yourself or use a JS library like Hammer which adds unnecessary bloat.
  • Something1234 5y ago
    Don't do this without a good reason. We finally got a lot of mobile sites rendering good and you want to take that away.
    • pier25 5y ago
      A good reason is simply that gestures are a staple of mobile UIs.
  • beebeepka 5y ago
    1. It's a good thing that you have to implement them yourself. A lot of this stuff is super arbitrary. 2. Opera had gestures 15+ years ago and it was glorious for those that liked them
• wibagusto 5y ago
  I’d argue that it’s having to do with standards bodies too. The time it takes for many to agree on standardized APIs for mobile. Apple and Google can simply say: “this is our native API” and people will use it quickly and effectively. Also there’s incentive for Apple to keep people on their platform and standards are tangential. Also, desktop browsers have been around for over 30 years, and hence the click, double click, scroll, and basic key shortcut metaphors have as well.
• throw_m239339 5y ago
  I would agree with you if not for the fact that a lot of these popular "native apps" are just webpages within a native wrapper, which kind of defeats your argument. Brands and vendors don't like the web because often they cannot 100% control what browsers do, and of course, a browser website cannot get access to the whole contact list, phone numbers and files on a phone device unlike a native app... Installing an app via an appstore on mobile is low friction. Good luck getting someone to install your Windows or MacOS app on your desktop... Even PWA that were all at rage a few years ago, called a replacement for native apps by the dev community, how many here have a single PWA installed on their desktop computer?
  • ipython 5y ago
    I would say that in the beginning most apps weren’t that way- precisely because of the issues with building rich web apps. Now that it’s possible to replicate a lot of the “native” feel on the web, more apps are choosing the “wrap in a webview” approach as it vastly simplifies the development process across web and multiple mobile/desktop platforms. Agreed on the control- another thing to consider at least in this crowd is that Safari content filters (aka ad blockers) aren’t applied in apps.
  • nemothekid 5y ago
    >I would agree with you if not for the fact that a lot of these popular "native apps" are just webpages within a native wrapper, which kind of defeats your argument. This doesn't seem true at all. What popular "native" apps are you talking about? The most popular native apps couldn't exist on the web on the early days. YouTube couldn't work on the web due to the dependence on Flash. Instagram couldn't exist without camera access (and arguably fast image processing which JS couldn't do at the time). The technology to build some of the most downloaded apps like Words With Friends or Angry Birds could not be done on the web.
    • ec109685 5y ago
      Amazon's app is an example.
  • 5y ago
• polote 5y ago
  > The real question is how did the web remain relevant while being so far behind this tectonic platform shift? Because CSS +HTML + JS is 20x easier to learn than any mobile code language. Anyone in a few hours can create a website, that has never been the case for mobile apps. You can even create a basic website by copy pasting some html template and modifying the content with notepad. As a result - as long as Google doesn't decide to deprecate HTML and CSS because it doesn't suit their complex requirements - the web is assured that much more people will be able to create website than apps. When you look at Kotlin or Swift, HTML looks like a no-code language
  • mycall 5y ago
    Expo.dev makes mobile app development pretty easy.
• heavyset_go 5y ago
  webOS was from the same ~2009 era, powering the Palm/HP Pre models, and its apps were developed in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It had a huge selection of 3rd party and open source apps developed using web technologies. This was the case for the first iteration of the iPhone, as well. The truth is that the web didn't flourish on mobile because the two mobile operating systems giants knew that they could make a killing by keeping a stranglehold on the mobile app distribution market with their app store models. And they did so successfully for a decade, making tens of billions of dollars each year from said stranglehold. Giving the web equal footing on their mobile operating systems like webOS did would put those billions of dollars of yearly revenue at risk.
• jmrm 5y ago
  > When iPhone and Android hit the scene the 'rich' web experience was primarily flash, silverlight, and some java applets (taking their last breathe). A lot of people have forgot that YouTube were using FLV (video streaming using Flash) during a lot of time because there wasn't any better multiplatform viable alternative. You are totally right. The web wasn't ready for new universal types of information exchanges and we needed to use 3rd parties to solve that, in form of a Flash plug-in or an installed app.
• novok 5y ago
  Also I think the app "look up random info and articles" was never lost for the mobile web. I don't think there are many apps for that even now. Yes there is the wikipedia and other such apps, but they are a sliver of the web.
• Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
  > the vast amounts of money/influence Google was willing to put in to keep it's search ads property relevant Mobile search ad clicks have been surpassing desktop search for a while now, If it was done solely through Google app and if iOS wasn't a thing then Google would have happily killed the web by this time. I think instant apps is(was?) an attempt at it.