It's a strategy to dismantle the Web, which had the "disadvantage" of being simultaneously free and a level playing field, and replacing it with a loose network of fiefdoms, each a walled garden (a term often used to describe Apple in its entirety).
Most of these apps are advertising delivery mechanisms masquerading as utilities. Another role they have is to prevent copying of content or links from one fiefdom to another. In doing that, they represent a retreat from the ideal of a public forum.
I think this idea works best with relatively young people who don't clearly understand what they're giving up when they download a proprietary app in order to read what should be a public document.
The old Web has many problems, but freedom of expression remains in the plus column.
A lot of those tablet apps suck, because the priorities driving them aren't the readers. This means that they'll either lose in the long run, or adapt to serve reader's needs.
I see your point, but if this were true, then cell phone service (another walled garden of separate fiefdoms) would gradually get better instead of worse. But it's getting worse.
I don't think this is correct. It's far more difficult to compete as a cell phone service due to FCC regulations. It's a government granted mono/duopoly.
I expect to see cell service remain complete shit. I don't expect these per-website apps as they exist now to be widely used.
It's my impression that the fact that a fairly limited range of frequencies are allocated for mobile phone use is a barrier to entry.
I don't think that's the main difference between the US and say... Germany though. I'm pretty sure German carriers are required to sell each other access to their networks under reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, making it fairly easy to become a carrier without building a bunch of cell towers. The phones are all GSM and almost all unlocked, so it really is as easy to switch as getting a SIM from a new carrier.
This actually appears to be a case of more regulation, applied to just the right spot resulting in more competition. Politically, I'm not usually in favor of a lot of regulation, but it looks like it works in this case.
I believe because it is a government-granted monopoly there must be regulation to introduce competition or the customers will be taken advantage of (especially with something like internet which should be regulated as a utility in the first place).
Like your case in Germany, and elsewhere in Europe where they are required to lease the "last mile" at a reasonable price. Internet connections in countries with these regulations are much faster and the charges are less compared to the USA.
In the US, we HAD a history of controlling monopolies and oligopolies carefully - the trust-busting era, the steel breakup, the comparatively recent AT&T breakup - but the government has largely abdicated any significant role here. The notable exception was the proposed AT&T/T-Mobile merger, which, ironically, probably would have actually helped improve technology and push down prices because both of those carriers are moving into the prepaid/pay as you go space aggressively. Unfortunately, both also use GSM band technology...
With respect to unlocking, however, I can't fathom why the device manufacturers, particularly Google/Motorola Mobility, don't play the adults here. They have more to gain from impressing the end-consumer than making time with carriers. It has to be more expensive for manufacturers to create several different versions of the same device for different carriers. In many cases, these are all but different devices - not the same radios, not the same functions, often not even the same processors. If these manufacturers made their flagship devices with both CDMA and GSM radios operating on all common bands (deactivated or not, as need may be), they would benefit from economies of scale, lowering their costs and allowing the devices to sell, unlocked, at lower costs. This would make sales directly to end-consumers more realistic, which would FORCE the carriers to improve their service, in order to bring people into their no longer walled gardens. That would force improvements in speed, price, and quality.
Right now, I guess, manufacturers benefit from advertising done by the carriers, but they also suffer from the walled garden and loss of economies of scale. I have no way of knowing which is worth more to them, but we have yet to see a true, universal, unlocked device from a carrier. We can tweak world CDMA phones to "work" on GSM networks, but not too well so far.
Spectrum ownership and broadcast power limitations. To operate as a wireless service provider at the scale that cell phone companies do, you need the FCCs explicit permission. The process to get approval is long, expensive, and fraught with peril (see the LightSquared debacle [1]).
This kind of regulation is ultimately justifiable. You don't want service providers using conflicting technologies and hammering each others airspace. You quickly end up with what economists call the tragedy of the commons[2].
Huh? As far as I can tell, cell phone service is getting better at a good clip. Were you routinely getting 10-20 Mbps of bandwidth three years ago? I wasn't.
My experience (in Australia) is not this. Sure, the number they write on the advertisement keeps getting bigger. But my mobile phone on Telstra CDMA circa 2001 was orders of magnitude better at making voice calls than my 3G Android phone today. It was a gradual decline. As the years went by, and I "upgraded", the quality of the phone call aspect of the device just went down and down and down. The computing and data aspect has got miles better, but the voice call 'feature' is now what I would consider broken.
I feel they are focusing on the data networks over the voice networks and phones are now computers, and all I really want is a reliable, robust voice call device, but I suppose I am not "the market" and the market wants shiny bells and whistles and apps that download content. Who makes calls anymore? I do.
I think you might rapidly be becoming a minority. The data service to my phone (ok 'phablet') is far more important to me than the voice aspect. I make a call a week on average, but use data constantly. This is not 'bells and whistles' and more, it's primary function.
I have a pocket-sized networked tablet that, as a bonus, can handle voice service pretty OK.
Dismantling the Web isn't anybody's strategy (making money is), but in any case, it's a poor strategy nonetheless. One of the most important things I've learned is that all other things being equal, convenience always wins. A strategy that makes things less convenient for consumers is a losing strategy.
> Dismantling the Web isn't anybody's strategy ...
By "web" I mean the public forum that anyone can access with a standards-compliant browser. And yes, there is such a strategy, and making money is the underlying motive.
> A strategy that makes things less convenient for consumers is a losing strategy.
Yes, unless consumers have no choice. Consider the present cell phone system -- it's perfectly terrible, and consumers can't do anything about it. The reason? Each cell phone company sells you a different interface device and tells you what you can and cannot do with it, to the degree that they now can charge you with a felony if you jailbreak their phone:
My point is that a free, public forum has every advantage (as you say) but if a company can prevent such a free forum in the name of making money, they will.
>For those who may not have understood or thought to ask, “unlocking” is not the same as “jailbreaking.” In a nutshell, jailbreaking involves making it possible for a device to run code either from sources the manufacturer did not intend the device to be able to use or to run code the manufacturer did not intend it to be able to run (though most people talk about Apple IOS devices, Sony, for example, will note that other devices can also be “jailbroken”). Unlocking, however, involves making it possible for a device intended for use on one wireless network to be used on a different network – wireless devices sold by a particular wireless company are generally, but not always, sold programmed so that they can only use that company’s network.
Jailbreaking is still legal. Also
There are a couple of factors that will disrupt the Web architecture.
The Web has trained us to build dumb clients and centralize anything of value on the server, at a huge cost and never enough trust. We can safely predict today that light-weight protocols, mediated by the mobile OS (and its Platform) will directly challenge the Web architecture, precisely because we can leverage the platform trust model. That evolution is extremely profound.
For instance, apps running on your device can securely and privately share information without requiring a complex temporal integration involving a 3rd party service (such as Google AdSense). The information is produced and consumed on the device or the device of a related end-user. What happens on your device can now stay on your device.
Just to be clear, and to show how disruptive that architecture is, the primary key of your private data becomes your phone, not your identity. Merchants no longer need to identify you. They can’t care less about YOU, they just care to know some information about you. The problem with the Web Architecture was that the only way to do that was to associate PII to a primary key on a server and hence merchants needed to identify you to track your every move (and they shamelessly did).
The second factor is just as profound: the very open nature of the Web is driving scale over scope. The Web has successfully nurtured the largest Catalog, the largest Search engine, the largest Auction site, the largest Social Network, but I see this as a negative side effect of the Web architecture because it limits the scope of what people can do. In other words, the scope of what Amazon, Google or Facebook offer is limited by the scale (and hence the revenue) they can achieve.
I actually argue that a trust-based neutral Platform will support a more vibrant and diverse ecosystem than a truly open model because in essence a Web business couples the leve of trust it can achieve with the functionality it can deliver. The Platform decouples the trust from the functionality and it enables much smaller actors to deliver a lot more scenarios while relying on the trust establish by the Platform.
If I'm understanding you correctly, then you're essentially arguing that the CATB analogy applies to the infrastructure of the web. Would you say that something like Diaspora is something which uses the Bazaar approach?
Secondly, given your model of what you believe the future of trust looks like - what do I do if I lose my phone? How do I 'get back in' to the Platform if my primary key gets lost?
In my view, authentication requires a third-party - one which provides the 'yay or nay' that somebody is who they say they are. If you don't have that, then your relationship with any client is one which cannot be verified: it's the equivalent of asking for an ID card without checking that it's real.
All US Carriers at least allow unlocking as long as you own the phone. Emphasis on own (paid off your contract so you are no longer "renting" it or you paid for it outright). That would include all GSM phones and all Global phones on CDMA based carriers (such as the Galaxy S3 or iPhone 5).
So this is just splitting hairs between proximate and ultimate causes. We could say the the prime motivation is profit - a specialized case of making money. In order to turn a profit one must make more money than one spends. It is thought that by monetizing the content and sealing it off one can maximize one's revenue stream. The end result is dismantling the web.
Convenience does always seem to win. I suppose because people are lazy. Or short-sighted. It's hard to put in extra effort now for some saving down the road.
Sorry, but I see way way way less ads in apps than on the web.
I'd say the web is stuck with the mindset that the only way to make money is by heavy advertising or selling you to the ads companies.
> Sorry, but I see way way way less ads in apps than on the web.
Yes, because these "walled-garden" apps are just being introduced, and they want to be on their best behavior for the moment. Sort of like a drug dealer, who gives the addict his first hit free.
Also, I think you meant to say "fewer ads", not "less ads":
Since language isn't science, and since dictionaries are only meant to describe how people use words, not tell people how to use words, that claim could be made about any grammar rule or word definition or spelling, with some degree of justice.
The counterargument is that clear communications is helped along by adopting common conventions for word usage.
And the linked article only points out that there are ambiguous cases where less or fewer are equally appropriate, not that the rule has no merit.
> Another role they have is to prevent copying of content or links from one fiefdom to another.
I have a hard time believing that considering the prevalence of the "share" button in apps.
There is certainly a "walled garden" problem on iOS, with all the jailbroken nonsense linked to it, but on Android (don't know about MS phones) I can run whatever I want. The app store is just curation, not limitating. Granted there are still some problems with rooting, but they seem to be disappearing from my view. Freedom of expression is still there.
>I think this idea works best with relatively young people who don't clearly understand what they're giving up when they download a proprietary app in order to read what should be a public document.
Could you cite an example where this is really true? I'm not trying to be facetious here, I'm just wondering what app locks out what would in another world be completely open info. The only thing I can think of is messangers, but that's more a practical thing than anything (again... access to phone APIs trump idealism).
>I have a hard time believing that considering the prevalence of the "share" button in apps.
In the OP's example this share button would just lead to a message of 'you need to download our app to view this material'
>There is certainly a "walled garden" problem on iOS, with all the jailbroken nonsense linked to it, but on Android (don't know about MS phones) I can run whatever I want. The app store is just curation, not limitating. Granted there are still some problems with rooting, but they seem to be disappearing from my view. Freedom of expression is still there.
AFAIK he wasn't talking about the OS being a walled garden, more that each app was. Not being able to share content between apps, combine the functionality of them, etc.
Being able to run whatever you want doesn't help if the content owners have locked it down to being only viewable in their app.
>> Another role they have is to prevent copying of content or links from one fiefdom to another.
> I have a hard time believing that considering the prevalence of the "share" button in apps.
But a "share" button in a dedicated app isn't remotely a hyperlink. A hyperlink only tells the reader about the destination, but a "share" button also tells the recipient about the source.
>> I think this idea works best with relatively young people who don't clearly understand what they're giving up when they download a proprietary app in order to read what should be a public document.
> Could you cite an example where this is really true?
Sure -- paywalls are a classic example. As soon as we accept paywalls and read articles behind paywalls, we can't share content any more. These dedicated apps are like paywalls taken to the next level.
But young, inexperienced people often don't see the problem with paywalls when compared to a public forum. The same logic applies to these dedicated apps -- they make it harder to share information. Their existence only serves the interests of the companies that create them.
> I'm just wondering what app locks out what would in another world be completely open info.
A browser gives you access to all content. A dedicated app only gives you access to that fiefdom's content. So such an app is not open in the way that a browser is, and you're limited to that app's purview.
Consider a cell phone as an more extreme example. It's a way to take conversation and make it into a product. A cell phone is sort of like one of these dedicated apps, in the sense that you can't freely move between fiefdoms -- and if you try, you have to pay "roaming charges".
The global issue is the commoditization of information -- turning information into property, into a commodity. The idea is to take a public forum like the Web, privatize it, and sell it back to what are now captive information consumers.
> Sure -- paywalls are a classic example. As soon as we accept paywalls and read articles behind paywalls, we can't share content any more. These dedicated apps are like paywalls taken to the next level.
> But young, inexperienced people often don't see the problem with paywalls when compared to a public forum. The same logic applies to these dedicated apps -- they make it harder to share information. Their existence only serves the interests of the companies that create them.
True, but I wasn't making a quantitative claim about behavior, only saying that it existed as a factor. And I have a self-referential problem with the source:
"With the purchase of a Premium Account figures, numbers, and downloads may be accessed."
The paywall is a good point. The current NYT model (pay after N articles, easy to circumvent) is a model I could live with in exchange to high-quality content. The problem is do I really want to pay for 5 different papers?
Great example. I used to think of paywalls a good thing (in exchange for less ad bullshit), but now it seems a bit dangerous.
It appears that part of the pricing strategy for online news is to charge so much that your subscribers won't even think of paying for another paper. I thought no one would pay these outrageous rates and the strategy would be DOA, but apparently it's actually been quite successful.
I don't know if its intentional or not, but I've run into several apps where highlight and copy isn't implemented / enabled. That's pretty very frustrating. Sometimes I just want to take notes, or google something, not share whatever it is on facebook / twitter / snapchat.
> but on Android (don't know about MS phones) I can run whatever I want.
Yeah, you need to install some other 'security app' that is essentially another rogue/thief to defend against any other burglar.
This has happened and is still happening in China where the Google Play is blocked and a number of 3rd party markets exist and thrive. Even a social network app would bother to remind you upgrading some other apps you have installed. Who knows who is stealing what?
I agree for the most part with this article. I think the major problem is that apps are being developed that offer absolutely no advantage over viewing the website in a browser - in fact many offer disadvantages. This is what happens when a market crowded with some shockingly bad app developers is combined with ignorant executive mandates that companies must have apps simply to be able to say that they have them.
In most cases, I find the apps are actually worse than using the browser. A lot of them are little more than branded Webkit wrappers, with $SITENAME in a coloured bar across the top. If you're going to force me to use an app, it needs to offer some really concrete advantages over the site, and should actually act like an app. One simple win would be a global text resize setting -- give me the option to increase, or decrease, text size throughout your app and then remember it.
One mobile app that I do think `does it right' is eBay's. It's not spectacular, but it's much better than their mobile site and feels like I'm using a real app. It really needs to improve upon its caching behaviour, though.
There's actually a submission rule for iOS that says an app shouldn't be just a web view for one site and no extra features. It's frustrating that the AppStore rules are often not enforced consistently.
They're popular with people who take the subway. Think about it, you're sitting there for half an hour with no service. An app that pre-downloads all of a newspaper's stories is handy and easy to use.
Sure it is, so long as you've remembered to fill Instapaper or Pocket with stories from the newspaper's website that you wanted to read. If you ran out the door without having time to peruse the stories on the internet this morning Instapaper won't do you any good.
Neither will having an app that you didn't launch and sync before getting on the subway. Seems like the same amount of effort to me.
There's an advantage to Instapaper and company in that it's centralized and you only have to launch the one app to pull down all of your content regardless of the source.
> Neither will having an app that you didn't launch and sync before getting on the subway. Seems like the same amount of effort to me.
And here I thought in 2013 apps could download their content in background when phone is idle. Maybe when the owner is sleeping at home with fast wifi all around. Might make too much sense though.
I can't tell if you're being purposefully obtuse or not.
iOS does not allow background downloading, unless your app is part of Newsstand. While it would seem to make sense to make your news delivery app appear in Newsstand, it does come with some trade-offs, most significantly that your app is locked inside the Newsstand shelf and can't be placed in a primary app slot.
And, even if your app is in Newsstand, you have to actively go into Settings and turn on background download on an app-by-app basis.
Finally, even then, the app will only background-download if you're on a WiFi connection. I agree, this makes sense in this age of metered WAN bandwidth.
So, if you're using iOS, there's a really good chance that you will not have that content before getting on the subway, unless you remember to click into it on the walk over to the station.
I'm not being purposefully obtuse. I was not aware of this particular limitation of iOS (and probably numerous others). Permission-controlled background downloading would seem like a reasonable solution to this particular problem to me.
OK, good -- thought I might be taking troll-bait, but in that case, glad I could provide information.
In principle, you're exactly right -- but iOS in particular has been notoriously picky about app sandboxing, and there is a very short list of permissions that apps are allowed to ask for: location, push notification, and I believe now address book access.
I've never tried this feature as it requires location services, but doesn't Instapaper offer exactly that? Location-based automatic downloading of new articles?
Offtopic, but I prefer it that way. I hear enough people yammering away all day, I don't need it on my commute as well (I'd be fine with it if they just instituted data, but since when has the MTA ever done anything intelligently?)
I think the main problem is that companies have their website designed for large screens only. Since it sucks on mobile screens, they then build an app instead of redesigning their website so that it works on little screens. The most famous example for that is Twitter.
We've been conditioned to want apps. Or... many people have. iPhone is synonymous with 'apps'. My grandmother understands 'apps' (well, mostly!)
I was on a project last year, and we built a mobile website (could work in iPhone/Android and probably winphone, but we didn't test). Got a lot of immediate "yeah that's great" from some people. Partners reached out for potential customers/sales - every single one returned with "where do I get the app".
They don't necessarily know what they need. Perhaps all they need is a bookmark for your site, exposed as a big button choice. You'd have to follow up with some testing to find out what this really meant.
Those people don't know what an app is. The people going "where's the app" will also look at your site on your phone and think it is an app. They just need a way to bookmark your site and see a little icon for it with their apps.
I'm continually disappointed by the non-proliferation of webapps. The iPhone has hooks enabling you to make it fullscreen, have an app icon, work offline, even control the colour of the status bar... but no-one knows how to use them. And Android doesn't even support them- I thought Google was supposed to be a friend of the web?!
In theory you're right. Unfortunately in practice most webapps better stay in the browser on iOS. The Javascript engine on full-screen webapps is slower than the one in Safari (that's why the previous Facebook app was slow as hell).
Aside from that, offline app cache is a PITA to implement.
Things have got better though. Web audio works on iOS 6, and Chrome on Android finally delivers a proper browser. I hope in a few years time we'll actually be able to serve games in WebGL to the browsers on both platforms.
The Javascript engine on full-screen webapps is slower than the one in Safari (that's why the previous Facebook app was slow as hell).
Not true[0]. Home-screen web apps use the Nitro engine as of iOS 5. It's only embedded web views (i.e. the Facebook app, Google Chrome on iOS) that don't. FWIW Chrome is my favorite browser on iOS, despite the speed loss.
We're solving that by actually having an app "installer" on the web page. It looks and feels like the App Store, and you "tap to install" just like you would a normal app.
We do actually download and stash most web resources, to speed up load times, so it's not completely window dressing. Our app is designed to be added to the Home Screen, but it also runs inside Safari or Chrome just fine.
What I really really don't like about the Android app model is that an app will come along and demand over a dozen permissions. And I either accept them all or don't download the app.
I have seen an app (probably root-only) that can restrict specific permissions on applications. There are no promises if it will break the app or not, though.
Currently, removing an individual permission from an app will almost certainly cause an unhandled exception, since having that permission makes security exceptions for the corresponding API calls unexpected.
This could be changed without breaking existing apps.
Google could modify Android's app model just slightly, to enable apps to declare in their manifest that they support "a la carte" permissions and then enable users to select individual permissions. To work under this new permission model, apps would have to test for permissions, or handle security exceptions - small modifications.
I think this kind of change would be well worth it. For example, I prefer to trust the OS is preventing location tracking than that the app developer is being honest about turning it off in a setting.
I really hate it when some apps require unnecessary permissions. Why would a game require access to my contacts or my personal photos and videos? Flicks me into the paranoid mode, especially since the news about Facebook and other major companies exporting your contact list and personal information to their servers.
"ignorant executive mandates that companies must have apps simply to be able to say that they have them"
This seems to be the case more often than not. Company executives feel pressured to release an app, any app, because "that's the future" according to whatever self-styled expert they listened to at XYZ Conference. So they crank out a useless app or two, and they get to tell their colleagues, peers, ad agencies, and Wall Street that they are forward thinking.
Such a strategy completely ignores the customer and his/her needs, of course. Publishing an app just to publish an app is pointless at best, and damaging to one's brand at worst. A company without a solid app strategy would be far better served just not releasing one at all. There is a negative ROI associated with a bad app, and not just in terms of the development and marketing dollars burned.
I continue to believe that most of these completely unnecessary apps are by internal devs who want to hone their skills in what they see is the great new lottery ticket, so they convince their hapless managers that they have to get on the app train. I've dealt with this enough.
I'm pretty sure there was a similar blog post with the exact same point on HN a few weeks ago. Seems like a rant about mobile apps not being as good as regular websites is a good way to make it to the front page.
I think this is mostly misguided trend-following on behalf of product marketing people. "Our competitors have an app, why don't we have an app? Let's make an app."
And then, to drive up the app's numbers, put a pop-up on the mobile version of the website with a link to download the app from the app store. Now the marketing genius who came up with this bright idea looks good and deserves a promotion.
With any luck the app fad will be over soon and we can get back to using a browser for all content instead of a different client for every type of content.
With the strides we've made in responsive layout design (WordPress and Twitter Boostrap sites look GREAT in mobile browsers!) there really is no excuse anymore.
Unfortunately for every clued in person that sees apps for what they are (a return to the past rather than a jump into the future) there are a hundred or more that have no idea about what is at stake here that will happily download your bullshit app.
If you don't mind me asking, what exactly is at stake? It's not exactly a step into the future but it's not really a step back either, when you consider apps that access phone capabilities (notifications, for example). For me there's also this notion of apps being registered on my phone for specific actions (want to share a photo? Use the facebook app). There are also places where I don't have net access, so having offline apps can be useful.
In an ideal world almost all of this can be transformed into what I imagine FF OS is trying to accomplish... but until then I am not exactly thrilled about it, but apps are not the devil incarnate either. They're pretty much the status quo.
I dont think the point is that apps are evil; the point is that they are inconvenient and unnecessary way to deliver text and images, if that's all they're designed to do. Interacting with the phone and notification capabilities of the OS is a solid use case for a client app; reading news articles is just not.
> If you don't mind me asking, what exactly is at stake?
Only the old-style Web, by design a public forum, accessible by everyone in the same way using standards-compliant browsers.
What we're seeing is a plan to convert a very efficient way to share information, but not an efficient way to make money, into something that favors the latter goal over the former.
> They're pretty much the status quo.
That may be, but not so long ago the Web was the status quo -- the free, public forum.
Remember when Tim Berners-Lee complained about the deleterious effect of nonstandard browser extensions? This trend is the ultimate nonstandard browser extension -- it eliminates the browser entirely.
There's nothing preventing the implementation of sharing via a website (or posting to a URL) instead of an app. There's nothing preventing standard interactions with your phone to be delivered by checking an API instead of requiring an app. You can still use many websites in offline mode.
They are right, pushing for apps can a way to silo data and prevent you from using your phone as a general purpose device. How can you share from the app if they don't bring up the list of intents for you? Can you select which push notifications to receive for a given app or do you get all of them? Etc.
> prevent you from using your phone as a general purpose
> device
So some time ago you were able to use your phone as a general purpose device? Interesting, for me iPhone was the first phone that made web bearable on mobile.
But there's Apple's continued refusal to let us use the hardware in any way they don't like, and this push for apps instead of websites. It looks to me like one step forward, two steps back.
We finally have these tiny computers in our pockets. We should push hard to stop anything restricting it. For me that includes refusing to use an app that offers nothing over the website other than push notice advertising.
Why couldn't people (like the nice fellows of pulse) create something which allows these newspapers to publish article from web to a mobile app? One single app for all the newspapers. Pay to subscribe or generate ad revenue, anything. Its really frustrating to not be able to read news on the phone.
I absolutely agree with this, I recently removed a bunch of news apps from my phone because I found myself using the browser to read news websites even when I had their app already installed.
One of the few advantages of a news app is the occasional notification and even then most the time they are implemented in an annoying fashion. It'd be nice if there was a standard that allowed users to subscribe to push notifications directly from websites without having to install an app. In general it'd be nice to see phone OS's opening up their api's to websites and not only apps.
> In general it'd be nice to see phone OS's opening up their api's to websites and not only apps.
It's hard to see that happening while the OS makers are involved in a "my App Store is bigger than your App Store" war, and they'd risk losing out on that 30% cut of paid apps.
Well, iOS does have its "Newsstand" app, which is essentially a reader for paywalled RSS feeds.
Still, the standalone apps for every publication that this thread is complaining about are free, too. I don't see paywalls being effective for anything but the most established media properties - NY Times can (sort of) get away with it, but can everyone else?
If the propagation of native apps really is because of an "everyone else is doing it" mindset, there's no reason not to just use RSS instead.
And all of these sites, even NY Times, already have RSS feeds of their content anyway.
> Still, the standalone apps for every publication that this thread is complaining about are free, too.
We've been discussing their effect, not their cost. If they prevent free exchange of information, then perhaps that's a meaning of "free" worth talking about.
That might be one of the manifest effects, but it's arguable as to whether that effect is actually the primary intention of driving users away from web content and toward standalone clients.
I doubt that most of the media sources that are pushing native apps are even thinking about it in these terms; most of it is probably bandwaggoning, and the originators of the phenomena probably just wanted a way of keeping their brand and content visible on the dashboard to avoid "out of site, out of mind".
In all likelihood, the net effect of attempting to shovel users off the web and into native apps is probably detrimental to the bottom line.
> but it's arguable as to whether that effect is actually the primary intention of driving users away from web content and toward standalone clients.
To the degree that people use dedicated apps, it is to that same degree that they're not using browsers and open media.
The motive for creating dedicated apps should seem obvious -- it turns a public forum into a series of competing private experiences, each with a loyal (or trapped) following. The classic example is Facebook -- people could have social media with a browser in a much less structured way, but people prefer Facebook, even though it is a highly structured, separate environment, one in which Mark Zuckerberg gets to decide what experience you have.
Because of Facebook's success, many other companies want some version of the same structure -- a controlled version of web browsing, separate from the public kind.
> In all likelihood, the net effect of attempting to shovel users off the web and into native apps is probably detrimental to the bottom line.
If that were true, people would avoid it (and Facebook would fail). But it's not true, and Web metrics support the idea that a dedicated app is a more efficient way to generate profits than waiting for people to visit your public Web site.
> To the degree that people use dedicated apps, it is to that same degree that they're not using browsers and open media.
True enough, but I'm not convinced that the latter effect is intended ore merely a side effect. This distinction is certainly key in assessing what alternatives those pushing native apps would be willing to consider.
> it turns a public forum into a series of competing private experiences
Again, this is a precipitate effect, but it's not clear that this is the intended effect that reveals the underlying motivation. I do think that motivation is present among some - Facebook, certainly, though they seem less interested in driving people away from the web than in hijacking the web and turning it into their own proprietary platform - but, again, I think that the native-app trend is largely bandwagonning initially motivated by smaller websites' management desiring to have their brand in readers' view for more often and for longer. If the UI for iOS worked differently, and RSS feeds could be accessed via a method indistinguishable from accessing native apps, I think we'd see far fewer native apps.
Server Sent Events are possibly what you're looking for. There are extensions for interfacing with low power mobile device wakeup and notification protocols as well, IIRC.
Agree with the OP. I think someone like Flipboard is an example of doing it right. It is focused entirely on the content and the best way to present it to you for ease of consumption.
Is this true? I've never seen that. Many times the app is heavily suggested, but I've never been locked out of the regular website just because I'm on mobile.
I also believe Mobile Chrome lets you fake a desktop user agent so there's no way for a website to lock out a mobile user.
That said, I totally agree with the OP, these "content apps" are ridiculous and very annoying.
I just tested this in Chrome on Android and it's not true; I'm able to browse Quora all I want without downloading any app (although there is a prominent button that says "View in Quora App").
To be really sure I also tested it in Safari on iOS and the experience is the same.
I find the default iOS popup advertising an app the worst part, by large the app offers extra functionality over the web. the popup disrupts the experience and I also have the same feelings of rage on random site for some random stupid bullshit app.
The compass in the iPhone for example, does device allow a web server query the phones heading through browser?
Offline modes and caching are features not really possible with the browser.
As for the giving something up, open public web access to proprietary apps, this is very true. I don't see big content moving away from the web though, the app ecosystem seems to compliment it.
And most apps require permissions that have very little to do with the purpose of the app. Here's what the BBC news reader for Android wants:
THIS APPLICATION HAS ACCESS TO THE FOLLOWING:
HARDWARE CONTROLS
CHANGE YOUR AUDIO SETTINGS
Allows the app to modify global audio settings such as volume and which speaker is used for output.
NETWORK COMMUNICATION
FULL NETWORK ACCESS
Allows the app to create network sockets and use custom network protocols. The browser and other applications provide means to send data to the internet, so this permission is not required to send data to the internet.
PHONE CALLS
READ PHONE STATUS AND IDENTITY
Allows the app to access the phone features of the device. This permission allows the app to determine the phone number and device IDs, whether a call is active, and the remote number connected by a call.
STORAGE
MODIFY OR DELETE THE CONTENTS OF YOUR USB STORAGE MODIFY OR DELETE THE CONTENTS OF YOUR SD CARD
Allows the app to write to the USB storage. Allows the app to write to the SD card.
SYSTEM TOOLS
PREVENT TABLET FROM SLEEPING PREVENT PHONE FROM SLEEPING
Allows the app to prevent the tablet from going to sleep. Allows the app to prevent the phone from going to sleep.
Right, so in order to duplicate everything the browser already does, they "need" these overly broad permissions. That's exactly the point the OP was making.
I think the real problem is that permissions are either too broad for the purpose of displaying some content, or they are too many for anyone to understand. My conclusion is that such apps simply make no sense.
They may be explainable but do you really want to install an app that _could_ keep track of the numbers you call and then send them back to a central server?
In this case it is the BBC, so its probably only likely that the british government, the metropolitan police or mi 5/6 would be able to convince them to do it but a whole lot of less scrupulous organisations ask for that permission.
I think Android permissions are probably the best at the moment, because they actually exist, are centrally located, and are easy to read. You won't see any certain permission detail longer than a few sentences. They also are shared, so if you have seen one permission for an app to access your contacts, it will be the same in all apps. Apple requires less permissions disclosure and they can be listed in the app store, or on the developers site.
However, ideally I would like to see the current Android permissions segmented further. Right now they act as a catch all to ensure all bases are covered. This is often way beyond what most apps need and actually use, making users second guess what they are installing (at least, they do for me).
I'm not an expert on Android permissions, but those seem reasonable to me. What permissions do you have a problem with, and what should they replace it with, or do you think is totally unnecessary?
The BBC news app caches pics and content - that's how when you open it a second time (even if it was shut down) it can show the tiles really quickly without downloading them.
Okay, and why does that mean it needs access to my complete filesystem rather than just a little namespaced, security-controlled chunk of filesystem allocated by the OS to it?
Historically, on Android, there has been very little space in the data area for each individual app. An app that cached to that would have been unusable on my Nexus One for example, where I constantly had to delete apps whenever I wanted to install a new one, and I had very few - something like 10 or 15.
The best place for the user has been to cache to the SD card, or the internal storage partition setup to look like an SD card. There are even many root required hacks to move app data to there and similar. The storage permission is needed to access the SD card, however.
Even in non-rooted Android things are changing, however. Apps that accept certain limitations, like no reliable background services, can be set to be installed to SD card. The latest versions do away with mounting as an SD card entirely and should help unify the storage, although everyone hates the new MTP protocol being used to access data from the PC when the phone is plugging in now.
One issue with these permissions is that I don't have a clue what they mean. Does the list of permissions I posted give that app the right to read all my personal data and upload it to one of their servers? Can it delete all my contacts or pictures? Can it make phone calls on my behalf or record my phone calls and upload the audio file to a server?
I know it's not answering your actual point, but I'll answer your specific questions. No, it can't record audio, or make phone calls on your behalf -- both require specific permissions that aren't listed here. It can't access your contacts at all, either, as that requires a specific permission.
Pictures are stored on the SD card, so the app could read all your pictures, upload them, then delete them. Newer devices have more internal storage, so hopefully applications will gradually move away from using this permission. Apparently, the next version of Android will introduce a new permission for reading the SD card too -- at present, any application may read from the SD card.
"Read[ing] all my personal data" depends on what you count as personal data -- security-sensitive info should not be on the SD card (things like phone number (although the phone state and identity permission gives access to this), contacts, account details), but anything that is on the SD card may be read by any application. That means pictures and music, at least.
I wonder if it might be useful to always list all of the common permissions, to make it easier to see which ones an application doesn't have. I've installed enough Android apps to have a reasonable idea of what's available (and by extension, what any given app can't do) but it's reasonable to assume I'm in a small minority.
Thanks for the info. I agree that knowing what an app can't do would be very useful.
And I think there should be a notion of "secure/private/encrypted storage". So when I tell an app to store some item there, I can be absolutely certain that no other app will ever be able to access it, regardless of any permissions.
Every app has its own protected storage space, but that's historically often been quite restricted in size. This is where things like SQLite databases are usually stored. It's also (pretty much by definition) not accessible using a file manager and it's much more difficult to share data from it, so it's not appropriate for music or pictures.
Why not just do the same thing we have been using for years, /tmp. If the program just needs scratch space why do we deem it proper to allow any app to traverse an entire partition so it can set down a couple of files?
Amusing that a rant like this reached #1 spot. Take worst case scenario, darken colors a bit more and then make a generalized conclusion on "web vs. apps".
Why do you even look at it as web vs. apps? Are we still fighting radio vs. tv vs. movies vs. theater?
If your app is nothing more than webview loading the same content, it is stupid.
To see each app as a threat to "open web" even more stupid. To pretend that web tech is always superior… well, that just shows you don't know much about either web tech and native frameworks.
And you know what? It is not that app developers want to kill web, it's the opposite—some web devs want to kill apps "before it is too late". I have no idea, why.
This is sad, really, and even more sad when prominent figures in web world start spreading FUD, sometimes even presenting it as "disspeling myths".
How about putting your insecurities aside, take a deep breath, spend some time thinking what the web is and what it is good for, what an app is and what it is good for and act accordingly?
Because the issue under discussion is proprietary applications with sequestered content, versus standards-compliant browsers accessing a public Web.
> To see each app as a threat to "open web" even more stupid.
Try to fill out your argument. Calling it "stupid" isn't an argument.
If an app sequesters content, and if that content would otherwise be publicly available, then the app has nothing but disadvantages compared to a browser -- for the user, not the company that designed the app.
I didn't. I said that the overhead of installing an app is unnecessary for the use case of reading the news. I wouldn't install a custom binary on my laptop to read a news website, why should I do so on my phone?
I posted about that a while back, although not in such a colorful language, and didn't get that much traction, maybe that's why. ;)
But I do agree that it's annoying when you go to a site and it's not just a reminder but a full screen ad for their app. I also hate sites that feel the need to load the page, detect you're on an iPad, clear the screen, then load another version that is slower to load and works worse, but has nifty side scrolling.
He missed step 1: try to click on the fiddly, tiny hyperlinks to dismiss the gigantic "How cookies work" statement, every bloody time you visit the site.
Are there some websites which don't work well after selecting "request desktop sure"? So far it's been my default reaction when "forced" to install an app.
• If you're on a computer, you just head to their website, login, and read the newspaper.
• If you're on an Android device, you just head to their website, login, and read the newspaper.
• If you're on an Apple device, you're directed to download the bullshit iOS app.
The reason they give for requiring the bullshit iOS app is that the website requires Flash to do its thing. That makes me wonder if they bothered testing the website on an Android device released after August 2012, when Adobe dropped support for new installs of Flash Player on Android...
It also makes me wonder if they got the memo about the rest of the world moving away from Flash...
Whilst I agree with some of the sentiments the article conveys, I'm doubtful that many people who feel this strongly actually would bother to go through these steps. Of those news organisations whose sites you regularly read, which of them actually do this and of those which would you feel happy installing an app for? I read numerous news articles on the web, but I only have one news app installed (for The Guardian), and they don't even exhibit this behaviour.
It would seem to me the most practical thing to do is to just dismiss the alert, cluck my tongue at the site's hubris, then read the article within the mobile browser — which more often than not is an option. Where it is not, to actually go down the route of installing the app of an organisation that manifestly has contempt for the end user, then upon discovering it offers up a terrible experience conclude this is fait accompli in the debate of web vs native apps seems like wilful prejudice.
The concluding remarks offer up straw man arguments for why native applications are a bad thing, in spite of the anecdote really just being about companies (which coincidentally makes money from somebody other than the end user) who treat the end user like nothing other the commodity they truly see them as.
What this article ignores is that the computer is always a multi-purpose-multi-tasking tool, while phones for the most part and by most people are used for one thing at a time.
There are notifications, but otherwise as long as you're happy doing what you're in an app you'll stay there. That's a big advantage for an organization like a newspaper, and an obvious reason to go for an app.
It helps the consumer because if it's a good app, it allows you to better focus on that one task you're after. Reading the news, for example. I haven't had any of the problems he discusses with the NYTimes app, for example.
For the organization, the benefits of longer engagement are pretty obvious as well.
He's right about a lot of bad developers (and clueless execs) producing really crappy apps. He's wrong if he thinks that a lot of the bigger brands are still at that stage.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadMost of these apps are advertising delivery mechanisms masquerading as utilities. Another role they have is to prevent copying of content or links from one fiefdom to another. In doing that, they represent a retreat from the ideal of a public forum.
I think this idea works best with relatively young people who don't clearly understand what they're giving up when they download a proprietary app in order to read what should be a public document.
The old Web has many problems, but freedom of expression remains in the plus column.
I expect to see cell service remain complete shit. I don't expect these per-website apps as they exist now to be widely used.
I don't think that's the main difference between the US and say... Germany though. I'm pretty sure German carriers are required to sell each other access to their networks under reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, making it fairly easy to become a carrier without building a bunch of cell towers. The phones are all GSM and almost all unlocked, so it really is as easy to switch as getting a SIM from a new carrier.
This actually appears to be a case of more regulation, applied to just the right spot resulting in more competition. Politically, I'm not usually in favor of a lot of regulation, but it looks like it works in this case.
Like your case in Germany, and elsewhere in Europe where they are required to lease the "last mile" at a reasonable price. Internet connections in countries with these regulations are much faster and the charges are less compared to the USA.
In the US, we HAD a history of controlling monopolies and oligopolies carefully - the trust-busting era, the steel breakup, the comparatively recent AT&T breakup - but the government has largely abdicated any significant role here. The notable exception was the proposed AT&T/T-Mobile merger, which, ironically, probably would have actually helped improve technology and push down prices because both of those carriers are moving into the prepaid/pay as you go space aggressively. Unfortunately, both also use GSM band technology...
With respect to unlocking, however, I can't fathom why the device manufacturers, particularly Google/Motorola Mobility, don't play the adults here. They have more to gain from impressing the end-consumer than making time with carriers. It has to be more expensive for manufacturers to create several different versions of the same device for different carriers. In many cases, these are all but different devices - not the same radios, not the same functions, often not even the same processors. If these manufacturers made their flagship devices with both CDMA and GSM radios operating on all common bands (deactivated or not, as need may be), they would benefit from economies of scale, lowering their costs and allowing the devices to sell, unlocked, at lower costs. This would make sales directly to end-consumers more realistic, which would FORCE the carriers to improve their service, in order to bring people into their no longer walled gardens. That would force improvements in speed, price, and quality.
Right now, I guess, manufacturers benefit from advertising done by the carriers, but they also suffer from the walled garden and loss of economies of scale. I have no way of knowing which is worth more to them, but we have yet to see a true, universal, unlocked device from a carrier. We can tweak world CDMA phones to "work" on GSM networks, but not too well so far.
This kind of regulation is ultimately justifiable. You don't want service providers using conflicting technologies and hammering each others airspace. You quickly end up with what economists call the tragedy of the commons[2].
1. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/lightsquared-redu... 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
I feel they are focusing on the data networks over the voice networks and phones are now computers, and all I really want is a reliable, robust voice call device, but I suppose I am not "the market" and the market wants shiny bells and whistles and apps that download content. Who makes calls anymore? I do.
I think you might rapidly be becoming a minority. The data service to my phone (ok 'phablet') is far more important to me than the voice aspect. I make a call a week on average, but use data constantly. This is not 'bells and whistles' and more, it's primary function.
I have a pocket-sized networked tablet that, as a bonus, can handle voice service pretty OK.
Dismantling the Web isn't anybody's strategy (making money is), but in any case, it's a poor strategy nonetheless. One of the most important things I've learned is that all other things being equal, convenience always wins. A strategy that makes things less convenient for consumers is a losing strategy.
> Dismantling the Web isn't anybody's strategy ...
By "web" I mean the public forum that anyone can access with a standards-compliant browser. And yes, there is such a strategy, and making money is the underlying motive.
> A strategy that makes things less convenient for consumers is a losing strategy.
Yes, unless consumers have no choice. Consider the present cell phone system -- it's perfectly terrible, and consumers can't do anything about it. The reason? Each cell phone company sells you a different interface device and tells you what you can and cannot do with it, to the degree that they now can charge you with a felony if you jailbreak their phone:
http://internetlawforbusinesses.com/2013/01/31/how-your-cell...
My point is that a free, public forum has every advantage (as you say) but if a company can prevent such a free forum in the name of making money, they will.
>For those who may not have understood or thought to ask, “unlocking” is not the same as “jailbreaking.” In a nutshell, jailbreaking involves making it possible for a device to run code either from sources the manufacturer did not intend the device to be able to use or to run code the manufacturer did not intend it to be able to run (though most people talk about Apple IOS devices, Sony, for example, will note that other devices can also be “jailbroken”). Unlocking, however, involves making it possible for a device intended for use on one wireless network to be used on a different network – wireless devices sold by a particular wireless company are generally, but not always, sold programmed so that they can only use that company’s network.
Jailbreaking is still legal. Also
There are a couple of factors that will disrupt the Web architecture. The Web has trained us to build dumb clients and centralize anything of value on the server, at a huge cost and never enough trust. We can safely predict today that light-weight protocols, mediated by the mobile OS (and its Platform) will directly challenge the Web architecture, precisely because we can leverage the platform trust model. That evolution is extremely profound. For instance, apps running on your device can securely and privately share information without requiring a complex temporal integration involving a 3rd party service (such as Google AdSense). The information is produced and consumed on the device or the device of a related end-user. What happens on your device can now stay on your device. Just to be clear, and to show how disruptive that architecture is, the primary key of your private data becomes your phone, not your identity. Merchants no longer need to identify you. They can’t care less about YOU, they just care to know some information about you. The problem with the Web Architecture was that the only way to do that was to associate PII to a primary key on a server and hence merchants needed to identify you to track your every move (and they shamelessly did). The second factor is just as profound: the very open nature of the Web is driving scale over scope. The Web has successfully nurtured the largest Catalog, the largest Search engine, the largest Auction site, the largest Social Network, but I see this as a negative side effect of the Web architecture because it limits the scope of what people can do. In other words, the scope of what Amazon, Google or Facebook offer is limited by the scale (and hence the revenue) they can achieve. I actually argue that a trust-based neutral Platform will support a more vibrant and diverse ecosystem than a truly open model because in essence a Web business couples the leve of trust it can achieve with the functionality it can deliver. The Platform decouples the trust from the functionality and it enables much smaller actors to deliver a lot more scenarios while relying on the trust establish by the Platform.
Secondly, given your model of what you believe the future of trust looks like - what do I do if I lose my phone? How do I 'get back in' to the Platform if my primary key gets lost?
In my view, authentication requires a third-party - one which provides the 'yay or nay' that somebody is who they say they are. If you don't have that, then your relationship with any client is one which cannot be verified: it's the equivalent of asking for an ID card without checking that it's real.
Not any more:
http://investorplace.com/2013/01/jailbreaking-your-phone-wil...
Quote: "‘Jailbreaking’ Your Phone Will Be Illegal After Jan. 26 ... Wireless carriers will now have to give permission"
Jailbreaking: getting root on the phone
Unlocking: configuring the phone so it can be used on any cell network
Jailbreaking is still legal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_and_ultimate_causatio...
Convenience does always seem to win. I suppose because people are lazy. Or short-sighted. It's hard to put in extra effort now for some saving down the road.
Yes, because these "walled-garden" apps are just being introduced, and they want to be on their best behavior for the moment. Sort of like a drug dealer, who gives the addict his first hit free.
Also, I think you meant to say "fewer ads", not "less ads":
http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/less-or-fewer
Or fewer ads requiring less space.
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003775.h...
Since language isn't science, and since dictionaries are only meant to describe how people use words, not tell people how to use words, that claim could be made about any grammar rule or word definition or spelling, with some degree of justice.
The counterargument is that clear communications is helped along by adopting common conventions for word usage.
And the linked article only points out that there are ambiguous cases where less or fewer are equally appropriate, not that the rule has no merit.
I have a hard time believing that considering the prevalence of the "share" button in apps.
There is certainly a "walled garden" problem on iOS, with all the jailbroken nonsense linked to it, but on Android (don't know about MS phones) I can run whatever I want. The app store is just curation, not limitating. Granted there are still some problems with rooting, but they seem to be disappearing from my view. Freedom of expression is still there.
>I think this idea works best with relatively young people who don't clearly understand what they're giving up when they download a proprietary app in order to read what should be a public document.
Could you cite an example where this is really true? I'm not trying to be facetious here, I'm just wondering what app locks out what would in another world be completely open info. The only thing I can think of is messangers, but that's more a practical thing than anything (again... access to phone APIs trump idealism).
In the OP's example this share button would just lead to a message of 'you need to download our app to view this material'
>There is certainly a "walled garden" problem on iOS, with all the jailbroken nonsense linked to it, but on Android (don't know about MS phones) I can run whatever I want. The app store is just curation, not limitating. Granted there are still some problems with rooting, but they seem to be disappearing from my view. Freedom of expression is still there.
AFAIK he wasn't talking about the OS being a walled garden, more that each app was. Not being able to share content between apps, combine the functionality of them, etc.
Being able to run whatever you want doesn't help if the content owners have locked it down to being only viewable in their app.
> I have a hard time believing that considering the prevalence of the "share" button in apps.
But a "share" button in a dedicated app isn't remotely a hyperlink. A hyperlink only tells the reader about the destination, but a "share" button also tells the recipient about the source.
>> I think this idea works best with relatively young people who don't clearly understand what they're giving up when they download a proprietary app in order to read what should be a public document.
> Could you cite an example where this is really true?
Sure -- paywalls are a classic example. As soon as we accept paywalls and read articles behind paywalls, we can't share content any more. These dedicated apps are like paywalls taken to the next level.
But young, inexperienced people often don't see the problem with paywalls when compared to a public forum. The same logic applies to these dedicated apps -- they make it harder to share information. Their existence only serves the interests of the companies that create them.
> I'm just wondering what app locks out what would in another world be completely open info.
A browser gives you access to all content. A dedicated app only gives you access to that fiefdom's content. So such an app is not open in the way that a browser is, and you're limited to that app's purview.
Consider a cell phone as an more extreme example. It's a way to take conversation and make it into a product. A cell phone is sort of like one of these dedicated apps, in the sense that you can't freely move between fiefdoms -- and if you try, you have to pay "roaming charges".
The global issue is the commoditization of information -- turning information into property, into a commodity. The idea is to take a public forum like the Web, privatize it, and sell it back to what are now captive information consumers.
> But young, inexperienced people often don't see the problem with paywalls when compared to a public forum. The same logic applies to these dedicated apps -- they make it harder to share information. Their existence only serves the interests of the companies that create them.
Not exactly citation.
http://www.statista.com/statistics/238775/attitudes-towards-...
Which, coincidentally, is itself behind a paywall.
True, but I wasn't making a quantitative claim about behavior, only saying that it existed as a factor. And I have a self-referential problem with the source:
"With the purchase of a Premium Account figures, numbers, and downloads may be accessed."
Somewhat funny, actually. :)
Great example. I used to think of paywalls a good thing (in exchange for less ad bullshit), but now it seems a bit dangerous.
Yeah, you need to install some other 'security app' that is essentially another rogue/thief to defend against any other burglar.
This has happened and is still happening in China where the Google Play is blocked and a number of 3rd party markets exist and thrive. Even a social network app would bother to remind you upgrading some other apps you have installed. Who knows who is stealing what?
One mobile app that I do think `does it right' is eBay's. It's not spectacular, but it's much better than their mobile site and feels like I'm using a real app. It really needs to improve upon its caching behaviour, though.
There's an advantage to Instapaper and company in that it's centralized and you only have to launch the one app to pull down all of your content regardless of the source.
And here I thought in 2013 apps could download their content in background when phone is idle. Maybe when the owner is sleeping at home with fast wifi all around. Might make too much sense though.
iOS does not allow background downloading, unless your app is part of Newsstand. While it would seem to make sense to make your news delivery app appear in Newsstand, it does come with some trade-offs, most significantly that your app is locked inside the Newsstand shelf and can't be placed in a primary app slot.
And, even if your app is in Newsstand, you have to actively go into Settings and turn on background download on an app-by-app basis.
Finally, even then, the app will only background-download if you're on a WiFi connection. I agree, this makes sense in this age of metered WAN bandwidth.
So, if you're using iOS, there's a really good chance that you will not have that content before getting on the subway, unless you remember to click into it on the walk over to the station.
In principle, you're exactly right -- but iOS in particular has been notoriously picky about app sandboxing, and there is a very short list of permissions that apps are allowed to ask for: location, push notification, and I believe now address book access.
(Okay, you could use Skype or whatever, but I'd expect the latency and reliability of the connection is too shitty for that.)
I was on a project last year, and we built a mobile website (could work in iPhone/Android and probably winphone, but we didn't test). Got a lot of immediate "yeah that's great" from some people. Partners reached out for potential customers/sales - every single one returned with "where do I get the app".
Us: "http://foobarsite.com.
Them: "Cool, but I can't see where to download the app!"
Us: "You don't - you just go to the website"
Them: "But I need an app!"
Aside from that, offline app cache is a PITA to implement.
Things have got better though. Web audio works on iOS 6, and Chrome on Android finally delivers a proper browser. I hope in a few years time we'll actually be able to serve games in WebGL to the browsers on both platforms.
Not true[0]. Home-screen web apps use the Nitro engine as of iOS 5. It's only embedded web views (i.e. the Facebook app, Google Chrome on iOS) that don't. FWIW Chrome is my favorite browser on iOS, despite the speed loss.
[0] http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/06/ios-5-brings-nitro-spee...
We do actually download and stash most web resources, to speed up load times, so it's not completely window dressing. Our app is designed to be added to the Home Screen, but it also runs inside Safari or Chrome just fine.
This could be changed without breaking existing apps.
Google could modify Android's app model just slightly, to enable apps to declare in their manifest that they support "a la carte" permissions and then enable users to select individual permissions. To work under this new permission model, apps would have to test for permissions, or handle security exceptions - small modifications.
I think this kind of change would be well worth it. For example, I prefer to trust the OS is preventing location tracking than that the app developer is being honest about turning it off in a setting.
This seems to be the case more often than not. Company executives feel pressured to release an app, any app, because "that's the future" according to whatever self-styled expert they listened to at XYZ Conference. So they crank out a useless app or two, and they get to tell their colleagues, peers, ad agencies, and Wall Street that they are forward thinking.
Such a strategy completely ignores the customer and his/her needs, of course. Publishing an app just to publish an app is pointless at best, and damaging to one's brand at worst. A company without a solid app strategy would be far better served just not releasing one at all. There is a negative ROI associated with a bad app, and not just in terms of the development and marketing dollars burned.
You may be a clueless pointy-haired boss if...
And then, to drive up the app's numbers, put a pop-up on the mobile version of the website with a link to download the app from the app store. Now the marketing genius who came up with this bright idea looks good and deserves a promotion.
With any luck the app fad will be over soon and we can get back to using a browser for all content instead of a different client for every type of content.
With the strides we've made in responsive layout design (WordPress and Twitter Boostrap sites look GREAT in mobile browsers!) there really is no excuse anymore.
In an ideal world almost all of this can be transformed into what I imagine FF OS is trying to accomplish... but until then I am not exactly thrilled about it, but apps are not the devil incarnate either. They're pretty much the status quo.
Only the old-style Web, by design a public forum, accessible by everyone in the same way using standards-compliant browsers.
What we're seeing is a plan to convert a very efficient way to share information, but not an efficient way to make money, into something that favors the latter goal over the former.
> They're pretty much the status quo.
That may be, but not so long ago the Web was the status quo -- the free, public forum.
Remember when Tim Berners-Lee complained about the deleterious effect of nonstandard browser extensions? This trend is the ultimate nonstandard browser extension -- it eliminates the browser entirely.
They are right, pushing for apps can a way to silo data and prevent you from using your phone as a general purpose device. How can you share from the app if they don't bring up the list of intents for you? Can you select which push notifications to receive for a given app or do you get all of them? Etc.
But there's Apple's continued refusal to let us use the hardware in any way they don't like, and this push for apps instead of websites. It looks to me like one step forward, two steps back.
We finally have these tiny computers in our pockets. We should push hard to stop anything restricting it. For me that includes refusing to use an app that offers nothing over the website other than push notice advertising.
One of the few advantages of a news app is the occasional notification and even then most the time they are implemented in an annoying fashion. It'd be nice if there was a standard that allowed users to subscribe to push notifications directly from websites without having to install an app. In general it'd be nice to see phone OS's opening up their api's to websites and not only apps.
It's hard to see that happening while the OS makers are involved in a "my App Store is bigger than your App Store" war, and they'd risk losing out on that 30% cut of paid apps.
Is using a single RSS app for all content feeds not sufficient?
Yes, true, but companies can't sell you RSS, it's free in the same way that a browser is free, so that's right out.
The basic idea is to take what already exists and is free, and think of a way to capture it and sell it back to people.
Still, the standalone apps for every publication that this thread is complaining about are free, too. I don't see paywalls being effective for anything but the most established media properties - NY Times can (sort of) get away with it, but can everyone else?
If the propagation of native apps really is because of an "everyone else is doing it" mindset, there's no reason not to just use RSS instead.
And all of these sites, even NY Times, already have RSS feeds of their content anyway.
We've been discussing their effect, not their cost. If they prevent free exchange of information, then perhaps that's a meaning of "free" worth talking about.
I doubt that most of the media sources that are pushing native apps are even thinking about it in these terms; most of it is probably bandwaggoning, and the originators of the phenomena probably just wanted a way of keeping their brand and content visible on the dashboard to avoid "out of site, out of mind".
In all likelihood, the net effect of attempting to shovel users off the web and into native apps is probably detrimental to the bottom line.
To the degree that people use dedicated apps, it is to that same degree that they're not using browsers and open media.
The motive for creating dedicated apps should seem obvious -- it turns a public forum into a series of competing private experiences, each with a loyal (or trapped) following. The classic example is Facebook -- people could have social media with a browser in a much less structured way, but people prefer Facebook, even though it is a highly structured, separate environment, one in which Mark Zuckerberg gets to decide what experience you have.
Because of Facebook's success, many other companies want some version of the same structure -- a controlled version of web browsing, separate from the public kind.
> In all likelihood, the net effect of attempting to shovel users off the web and into native apps is probably detrimental to the bottom line.
If that were true, people would avoid it (and Facebook would fail). But it's not true, and Web metrics support the idea that a dedicated app is a more efficient way to generate profits than waiting for people to visit your public Web site.
> ... to avoid "out of site, out of mind".
Cute pun on "out of sight, out of mind".
True enough, but I'm not convinced that the latter effect is intended ore merely a side effect. This distinction is certainly key in assessing what alternatives those pushing native apps would be willing to consider.
> it turns a public forum into a series of competing private experiences
Again, this is a precipitate effect, but it's not clear that this is the intended effect that reveals the underlying motivation. I do think that motivation is present among some - Facebook, certainly, though they seem less interested in driving people away from the web than in hijacking the web and turning it into their own proprietary platform - but, again, I think that the native-app trend is largely bandwagonning initially motivated by smaller websites' management desiring to have their brand in readers' view for more often and for longer. If the UI for iOS worked differently, and RSS feeds could be accessed via a method indistinguishable from accessing native apps, I think we'd see far fewer native apps.
> and Facebook would fail
It may yet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server-sent_events
Is this true? I've never seen that. Many times the app is heavily suggested, but I've never been locked out of the regular website just because I'm on mobile.
I also believe Mobile Chrome lets you fake a desktop user agent so there's no way for a website to lock out a mobile user.
That said, I totally agree with the OP, these "content apps" are ridiculous and very annoying.
https://plus.google.com/106938703242944328523/posts/4CopSTtW...
To be really sure I also tested it in Safari on iOS and the experience is the same.
I can post pictures if you don't believe me! ;-)
The compass in the iPhone for example, does device allow a web server query the phones heading through browser? Offline modes and caching are features not really possible with the browser.
As for the giving something up, open public web access to proprietary apps, this is very true. I don't see big content moving away from the web though, the app ecosystem seems to compliment it.
As of April 2011, the article claims various degrees of support from mobile Chrome, Safari, Opera and Firefox.
There's also plenty of work on application caching and offline support (though, to be fair, that's a very hard problem): http://www.html5rocks.com/en/features/offline
THIS APPLICATION HAS ACCESS TO THE FOLLOWING:
HARDWARE CONTROLS
CHANGE YOUR AUDIO SETTINGS
Allows the app to modify global audio settings such as volume and which speaker is used for output.
NETWORK COMMUNICATION
FULL NETWORK ACCESS
Allows the app to create network sockets and use custom network protocols. The browser and other applications provide means to send data to the internet, so this permission is not required to send data to the internet.
PHONE CALLS
READ PHONE STATUS AND IDENTITY
Allows the app to access the phone features of the device. This permission allows the app to determine the phone number and device IDs, whether a call is active, and the remote number connected by a call.
STORAGE
MODIFY OR DELETE THE CONTENTS OF YOUR USB STORAGE MODIFY OR DELETE THE CONTENTS OF YOUR SD CARD
Allows the app to write to the USB storage. Allows the app to write to the SD card.
SYSTEM TOOLS
PREVENT TABLET FROM SLEEPING PREVENT PHONE FROM SLEEPING
Allows the app to prevent the tablet from going to sleep. Allows the app to prevent the phone from going to sleep.
Network access is usually reserved for multimedia
Phone Calls - status - is usually because if you receive a phone call any multimedia knows when to stop
storage - to store things to your sd card or move the app to your sd card
prevent from sleeping - if you're watching a video you don't want the screen to sleep.
I think the real problem is that permissions are either too broad for the purpose of displaying some content, or they are too many for anyone to understand. My conclusion is that such apps simply make no sense.
In this case it is the BBC, so its probably only likely that the british government, the metropolitan police or mi 5/6 would be able to convince them to do it but a whole lot of less scrupulous organisations ask for that permission.
However, ideally I would like to see the current Android permissions segmented further. Right now they act as a catch all to ensure all bases are covered. This is often way beyond what most apps need and actually use, making users second guess what they are installing (at least, they do for me).
The best place for the user has been to cache to the SD card, or the internal storage partition setup to look like an SD card. There are even many root required hacks to move app data to there and similar. The storage permission is needed to access the SD card, however.
Even in non-rooted Android things are changing, however. Apps that accept certain limitations, like no reliable background services, can be set to be installed to SD card. The latest versions do away with mounting as an SD card entirely and should help unify the storage, although everyone hates the new MTP protocol being used to access data from the PC when the phone is plugging in now.
Pictures are stored on the SD card, so the app could read all your pictures, upload them, then delete them. Newer devices have more internal storage, so hopefully applications will gradually move away from using this permission. Apparently, the next version of Android will introduce a new permission for reading the SD card too -- at present, any application may read from the SD card.
"Read[ing] all my personal data" depends on what you count as personal data -- security-sensitive info should not be on the SD card (things like phone number (although the phone state and identity permission gives access to this), contacts, account details), but anything that is on the SD card may be read by any application. That means pictures and music, at least.
I wonder if it might be useful to always list all of the common permissions, to make it easier to see which ones an application doesn't have. I've installed enough Android apps to have a reasonable idea of what's available (and by extension, what any given app can't do) but it's reasonable to assume I'm in a small minority.
And I think there should be a notion of "secure/private/encrypted storage". So when I tell an app to store some item there, I can be absolutely certain that no other app will ever be able to access it, regardless of any permissions.
If your app is nothing more than webview loading the same content, it is stupid. To see each app as a threat to "open web" even more stupid. To pretend that web tech is always superior… well, that just shows you don't know much about either web tech and native frameworks.
And you know what? It is not that app developers want to kill web, it's the opposite—some web devs want to kill apps "before it is too late". I have no idea, why. This is sad, really, and even more sad when prominent figures in web world start spreading FUD, sometimes even presenting it as "disspeling myths". How about putting your insecurities aside, take a deep breath, spend some time thinking what the web is and what it is good for, what an app is and what it is good for and act accordingly?
Because the issue under discussion is proprietary applications with sequestered content, versus standards-compliant browsers accessing a public Web.
> To see each app as a threat to "open web" even more stupid.
Try to fill out your argument. Calling it "stupid" isn't an argument.
If an app sequesters content, and if that content would otherwise be publicly available, then the app has nothing but disadvantages compared to a browser -- for the user, not the company that designed the app.
> To pretend that web tech is always superior ...
Straw Man. Only you have made this argument.
I didn't. I said that the overhead of installing an app is unnecessary for the use case of reading the news. I wouldn't install a custom binary on my laptop to read a news website, why should I do so on my phone?
But I do agree that it's annoying when you go to a site and it's not just a reminder but a full screen ad for their app. I also hate sites that feel the need to load the page, detect you're on an iPad, clear the screen, then load another version that is slower to load and works worse, but has nifty side scrolling.
http://www.roanoke.com/digitalsubscription/#replica
• If you're on a computer, you just head to their website, login, and read the newspaper.
• If you're on an Android device, you just head to their website, login, and read the newspaper.
• If you're on an Apple device, you're directed to download the bullshit iOS app.
The reason they give for requiring the bullshit iOS app is that the website requires Flash to do its thing. That makes me wonder if they bothered testing the website on an Android device released after August 2012, when Adobe dropped support for new installs of Flash Player on Android...
It also makes me wonder if they got the memo about the rest of the world moving away from Flash...
It would seem to me the most practical thing to do is to just dismiss the alert, cluck my tongue at the site's hubris, then read the article within the mobile browser — which more often than not is an option. Where it is not, to actually go down the route of installing the app of an organisation that manifestly has contempt for the end user, then upon discovering it offers up a terrible experience conclude this is fait accompli in the debate of web vs native apps seems like wilful prejudice.
The concluding remarks offer up straw man arguments for why native applications are a bad thing, in spite of the anecdote really just being about companies (which coincidentally makes money from somebody other than the end user) who treat the end user like nothing other the commodity they truly see them as.
For the organization, the benefits of longer engagement are pretty obvious as well.
He's right about a lot of bad developers (and clueless execs) producing really crappy apps. He's wrong if he thinks that a lot of the bigger brands are still at that stage.
Want swipe page turns ? That can be done in web. Scrolling? Zooming? Etc etc can all be done with a website.
Apps have there place, but I don't think news readers are it.