Not similar. Significantly lower. In fact, it’s not even number one because Android is a lot less popular in the US.

On one major platform, there is Chrome by default (so even bigger market share issues). People can install other browsers, but far fewer do than even on desktop. For those that do, most use the Play Store which has some conflict of interest concerns.

On the other platform it's even worse. The only option is Safari and the conflict of interest is fully realized because other browsers aren't even allowed on the App Store

At one point Samsung came with both Samsung Browser (chromium based) and Chrome preinstalled, but I'm not sure if that's changed in recent years.

Chrome dominates because it's better. People install it.

This is such a persistent myth on HN - I think I read it at least once a week - usually on one of the many alternative browsers, plenty of which are available on the AppStore.

WebKit is the building block of browsers on iOS, but there are an extremely varied selection of browsers using it.

HTTP literally runs on the application layer, as do email, IRC , gopher and all the old internet. Nowhere in the word "Application" is it implied that some CEO controls what porn people can view.

Browsers might as well be an OS of sorts the way people use and interact with them.

Of course, mobile OSes and OSes in general have become active and oriented to filtering input as well as generating inputs. This creep is everywhere - MS Windows displaying adds and flogging it's "app store" is one notably noxious example.

I guess an everything app would be different in that its maker probably goes like "Open-ended set of programs? Who cares, you nerd, I'm just gonna make deals."

I very much doubt that. Hell, I think the government would be all-for open payment standards as long as they're dollar-based and conform to tax legislation. The real roadblocks are the current protocol-holders like Apple and Google - their ability to profit off these technologies leave them in direct opposition to what you consider progress. And if iOS/Android doesn't adopt your open standards, you can forget about the general public adopting it.

Or you're going by what they say, not what they do.

Donations to wikileaks getting shutdown by payment providers under government pressure because they didn't like the journalism coming out of it exposing their wrong doings, donations to any inconvenient cause.

The caveat to that is to have regulated players the gov can control up to a point. Basically official banks.

Since the dawn of commerce governing entities have made critical efforts to regulate circulating money, there's no reason our current govs would allow that aspect to get out of their hand without a fight (that's basically why Facebook's crypto effort got canned)

The ones that are in favor of that already have open payment systems running (a lot do). If your country does not have one of those nowadays, it's because it's not important for the government.

next time the canadians have a civil disobedience problem they will not have to go to a bank to freeze money. they will just do it directly.

Governmnets are A-OK with outsourcing the police, secret services, public order etc to Google and Apple. It's cheap for them and easy , and nobody complaints. It shouldn't be any of those

"app" has the colloquial meaning of an icon on your device that you tap on that opens a thingy controlled by a company.

It's also worth pointing out, to the contrary, that unlike China the US markets are highly fractionalized. Some companies have tried to homogenize certain parts of the market, like Plaid, Stripe, etc but their homogenization is generally small when you look at the wider landscape. That's to say, to build an everything app and not start from scratch you'd have to buy many companies worth in the hundreds of millions and billions in order to build the conglomerate that could even shade this idea as "maybe possible".

And once you're bigger than that, you start having other options available to you if you must avoid those.

Especially if you stay away from video, it's not insanely hard. HN itself is two servers, IIRC.

One app that controls banking, P2P communications and mass media, with little to no competition, is a threat that should be protected against by law, if necessary.

Browsers started as a document reader app, now they are deploy platforms as well.

You need to develop apps with functionality for either OS or web platforms, or both.

[1].https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/24/online-...

that people have used to create closed systems that act as if there is nothing outside of its walls. if you drew a map of the "internet" so that closed systems (apps) with their walls are cities and everything else is unexplored areas marked with "here be dragons", then you'd see there's a lot more land mass outside of those closed systems.

This is 2022. We can't pretend our governmnets can be tech illiterate anymore, and we should not be allowing it

Ah, but that won’t line Elon Musk’s pockets.