Your needs as a developer don’t trump users needs.
They could have spent money making the open web work better on mobile. Or designing a portable app framework and runtime for all devices. But we know why they didn't and what the outcome has been.
And write once run everywhere worked so well with Java applets.
You still don't! You don't have the play by their rules, and you can still target everyone who has a non-Google or non-Apple phone, which as a target market is appreciably no one, much as it was before Google and Apple entered the phone market.
You can target them if they have phones produced by your hated manufacturers anyway by making your app a webapp instead of a native app.
You don't want to do those things, and that's fine, but you're yearning to go back to a time that never existed.
Personal PCs were just this back in the 90's and 00's. Microsoft tried to create a walled garden, but it failed due to the world wide web.
Google and Apple saw how Microsoft failed and decided that the app store would be a first class citizen on day one and that the mobile web [1] would be an afterthought. They learned from Microsoft's mistake and used their positions to make app stores the new status quo.
It could have easily gone a different way, but I understand how the business interests got us to where we are.
[1] the mobile web wouldn't have been nice without more money and research poured into it. The web stack could have been supplemented or a new one could have been developed. These companies obviously had other priorities than to pay for something that netted them nothing, but individual developers wound out worse for it.
Their SERPS will only return quotes on toxic MASCULINITY. Do the same thing in Yandex and they'll give you the correct results. Google uses AI to identify "non-PC sites" and push them down in the SERPS.
https://fox5sandiego.com/2019/01/17/fortnite-security-flaw-e...
I dislike apps. Sometimes they make sense. Fine.
Often, they do not, or offer less functionality than PC or web does.
If you need payment, make that easy, same. Cancel easy too. Just because that is nice, and we all could use nice. You like nice, I like nice. Let us be nice.
If you need profanity, whatever, I get it. Let's be adults.
I don't like the gate keepers and do not trust them. I do not expect you to trust me, nor you me.
Clean, open, portable web for both of us as much as can be managed.
I support you, you support me, us.
I can be a user on linux, android, iOS, Windows, BSD, whatever I can get on the web.
Sometimes dependent stuff is needed for the job. I get it. Please try to avoid that stuff, and I will try and run more relevant systems.
:D
I really do avoid apps, really do try and be a good user, really do prefer web and really do run a bunch of OSes.
We both are rare. I do advocacy every chance I get. Maybe you can too.
Stick together in a figurative sense.
My development is small, embedded systems and or specific purpose programs. Enough to get the engineer speaking here.
Hopefully, you are a user enough to do similar things.
<rant>Websites lack solid, consistent and platform-native look-and-feel. They are always limited, they aren't integrated with the operating system (i.e. task switcher), they are slow on almost anything (because modern web browsers are ugly giant behemoths. I've recently built myself a very beefy machine (16-core CPU, 128GiB RAM) and even now _sometimes_ sites are still choppy. On mobile, lots of sites are performing poorly.</rant>
For me, on mobile, it takes a LOT to bother with an app. Any alternative, even close to reasonable, gets the nod every time.
On a PC, this is less of an issue. Applications will often have great, or superior functionality. No worries.
On mobile? No. The opposite is nearly always true.
Should have been clear.
As for solid platform look and feel... depends there too. If the UX is really optimized for the task, I will take it. Have used so many now. Almost non issue there.
Generally I dislike app stores. This favors PC too.
For example, let's go all the way to the other end of the spectrum where the web as we know it didn't take off and everything was siloed into native apps that you had to download from the App Store before trying something new.
That seems pretty grim to me. I think we're in a sweet spot and lucky to have both.
Eh, you are but one person, amongst billions. There's a good chance that what you don't want != what others want.
You don't matter, consumers matter.
> Before Google and Apple, I didn't have this problem.
And you didn't have distribution either.
> But it wasn't always this way!
Indeed, there wasn't even distribution. Do you actually remember what was shipping mobile software back in 2005?
> I want them to pay back the negative externalities they've leveraged onto us.
Again, you as an engineer don't matter, only as a consumer. And consumers have never had so many options and at such low prices.
I agree it's not an Apples to Apples comparison, but it always strikes me that people forget they used to have to pay for distribution too.
I remember one piece of software I was working on would cost the company around $5K per release in download costs alone.
Now you have the web AND the in-device app stores. Even more choice.
There could have been an open, cross-platform native app stack if Apple and Google and a consortium of other companies had joined forces and made it so. There's no technical reason preventing this. The economic incentives got us to where we are.
Devices should be easy to target. There should be the option to use multiple app stores right off the bat, and you shouldn't have to bundle to get access to Gmail. Or even better - point your browser at gmail.com and get the native app installed on your mobile device. Distributed updates from gmail.com sans app store. The OS would still control permissions and guard against malicious apps.
The world wide web era was truly unique and special, and it's a shame the same principles didn't carry into the mobile world.
What's the difference? There's also no technical reason preventing you from developing your own cross-platform native app stack that beats Apple's and Google's with no conceivable return on investment, constant PR disasters, and time-consuming negotiation with bad-faith or incompetent partners. The forces that stop you are mostly economic.
The rest is just saudosistic nostalgia. There wasn't mass access to the internet, you're just missing the times when a small elite had access to the internet.
Consumers are far better now than they were.
The interest wasn't massive because things were not super easy. Phones bridged the gap. Fast forward to today you have less choice but bigger buy buttons.
You seem to have a mental image of the internet that doesn't correspond to reality. Poor didn't have access, they couldn't afford a computer, much less an internet plan.
Step out of the Hacker News bubble for a bit.
I was very, very poor. So were most of the kids I grew up with. Most of us couldn't afford new computers; that's true. So we bought old ones. My father - tears in his eyes - lugged in something ancient that he'd picked up for $50, having no idea how to use it but hoping that putting it in front me would do me some good. AOL had been mailing everyone in town (Detroit). Some kids got PCs from the nearby churches, some got them from the school (others still only ever used them in school). We collected and hoarded the access disks, and would go ringing each others' phones or knocking down doors to share websites we'd found. Imagine my embarrassment when I realized the AOL search results page was not the entire internet, and that I could click on any text with a blue outline.
> doesn't correspond to reality
I know there are people who managed (or didn't..) to grow up poorer than I did. But even poverty is a spectrum.
The "very poor" in the US are rich in most of the developing world.
If that doesn't qualify it as a product only available to the elites, I don't know what will...
Heck, in 2000, just under 30% of the global population had access to properly built sanitation services.
And about 28% of the global population live with under a $1 (in PPP) per day.
Respectfully, I think you are lacking some context about life in other countries.
I’m not though, and I have already said so. My original “poverty is a spectrum” comment still firmly addresses everything you’ve said, so if we still disagree, we can agree that’s ok.
You’re also factually incorrect about “a small elite had access to the internet”. That may have been true in the 80s, but by 2000 usage was at 50% and climbed to 75% by 2010. I mean the dot com boom was predicated on wide user adoption, so I don’t even know why you would even think that stat made inuitive sense.
No, it isn't false. Buying and/or installing an app today is orders of magnitude easier, safer and cheaper than 2005.
You clearly don't like it, and you probably are part of the little elite that had access to the internet before the general public did.
You can still do online everything that you used to in 2005, nothing was removed.
> That may have been true in the 80s, but by 2000 usage was at 50% and climbed to 75% by 2010.
Sorry the break the news to you, but the US isn't the world.
Maybe you should step out of the hacker news bubble for a minute.
What matters is only the impact to the consumer, and the consumer is far, far better off than in 2005.
edit: Its ofcourse a difficult subject, like with your parents getting too old to drive and not recognizing it, but after all not a technical but a societal problem.
I, the engineer, do not want them to do this. Before Google and Apple, I didn't have this problem. I didn't have to pay their tax or march to their beat.
You might argue that it's their platform and that's the cost for us to pay. But it wasn't always this way! These companies leveraged their advantages to steal eyeballs away from an open web and lock them in their own platform.
They could have spent money making the open web work better on mobile. Or designing a portable app framework and runtime for all devices. But we know why they didn't and what the outcome has been.
I want them to pay back the negative externalities they've leveraged onto us.