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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

> I think in fact a lot of people do want them to do this.

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.

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Well, at the same time users had to deal with adware, viruses, etc.

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.

> Before Google and Apple, I didn't have this problem. I didn't have to pay their tax or march to their beat.

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.

> 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.

Actually, you've got that history a little backward. The original iPhone had no App Store and had only web apps; that was the promoted way to develop for the platform. It was only after the phone's release and the mad clamor from developers to be allowed to develop native applications that an SDK was released and the App Store created.

My mistake. Thank you for correcting me.

I think you are accidentally retconning current status quo onto the past - early mobile internet was terrible, low bandwidth enough that mobile was about /fitting/ the page down the pipe instead of user interface, and also expensive with far lesser adoption such that wifi-only tablets/PDAs were more of a thing.

Google still has complete control over how well your web app is ranked in search results and they change rules and criteria all of the time, sometimes with little notice. Google search console is infuriatingly vague. Google is inescapable and opaque and I’m glad politicians are finally seeing these entities as monopoly powers that need to be addressed. They have a monopoly market share in web search and mobile devices so how is anyone supposed to NOT play by their rules?

You seriously overestimate their both their automated and manual control if you think they are capable of passive aggressive actions to non-entities. They closest they can come is hiding autosuggest when too many people complain or it becomes too sensitive like say "Ted Cruz Zodiac Killer".

They have much much done more than soft-censor autocomplete.

Google search for: women are toxic

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.

FWIW you can target Google phones outside Google Play too. You just need to tell the user to enable some settings and download an APK.

What could possibly go wrong....

https://fox5sandiego.com/2019/01/17/fortnite-security-flaw-e...

Please, you engineer, do your best to make the app usable from a browser.

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.

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.

I happen to prefer the exactly opposite - I don't want to run the browser (or a browser-wrapper), I want app to be native.

<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>

Both are just fine.

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.

Perhaps the best features about the web, though, are the share-centric nature of being able to pass around a link, the control we have over the client, and the distribution of apps and info that's least encumbered by gatekeepers.

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.

Haha nice one. I shall too advocate :D

It all adds up.

> I, the engineer, do not want them to do this

Eh, you are but one person, amongst billions. There's a good chance that what you don't want != what others want.

That's the problem with targeting the lowest common denominator. Since that LCD is mindless consumption, that's what the ecosystem evolves to. If you have stuff to actually do, you're increasingly out of luck.

AFAIKT, Google indeed pushes Progressive Web Apps pretty hard.

> I, the engineer, do not want them to do this.

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 don't entirely disagree with you, but what do we call the web if not distribution?

Someone still has to at least pay for the bandwidth though...

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.

The web didn't disappear, quite the opposite.

Now you have the web AND the in-device app stores. Even more choice.

But they're not equal citizens on mobile devices. Web often feels sluggish on mobile, and it doesn't have the same access to device and hardware APIs, nor does it allow low-level control of concurrency and allocation. (I don't want to get off topic about HTML/JS. It does a lot of jobs well.)

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.

> There's no technical reason preventing this. The economic incentives got us to where we are.

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.

You can do all of that, just download the apk. What you seem to want is that app stores should be forced to accept any apps?

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.

There was open access to the internet when aol started giving away cd-roms. Rich and poor, educated and less educated roamed different sites often clashing.

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.

> rich and poor

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.

> 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.

Very poor where? In the US?

The "very poor" in the US are rich in most of the developing world.

I am aware of this, anticipated this response from you (as you’ve repeated in this thread), and addressed it at the end of the comment you’re replying to. I do not believe that a global perspective diminishes the argument in any way.

Oh, it does. Only 5% of the global population had access to the internet in 2000.

If that doesn't qualify it as a product only available to the elites, I don't know what will...

Given the nature of your position it feels ironic to be saying to you that if you feel my family was amongst the worlds’ “elite” just because we lived in the US, then I believe you may need a more nuanced outlook on people. Also, there’s a tent-city of people outside my building who’d like a word with you.

Oh, if you could afford a computer, even an used one, in the 90's you were definitely part of a global elite.

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.

> Respectfully,

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.

The implication of “Consumers are far better now than they were” is that they are better, because of the App Store. This is false, completely illogical, and a straw man argument (as no one suggest users of tech have it worse in 2019 then 2005). Consumers are better off now, because technology has gotten better, not because App Stores have made things better. App Stores have actively caused harm to the consumers through lock in and through a compression of imagination amongst end users of how much better things could be.

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.

https://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/

> The implication of “Consumers are far better now than they were” is that they are better, because of the App Store. This is false, completely illogical, and a straw man argument (as no one suggest users of tech have it worse in 2019 then 2005).

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.

Your premise is sound. But it's in your conclusion that you miss the point. The point is its not 2005 anymore. Today, if Google didn't do it, someone else will and can. Except that a certain brand of monopolies set things up in a way that a rather worrying number of people think that without these monopolies there's no other choice. You think that it's Google that's enabled and empowered all of us. That, my friend, is where you are wrong.

Sure, someone else might have done it, but that's irrelevant. It doesn't matter if it was Google or Apple, or someone else.

What matters is only the impact to the consumer, and the consumer is far, far better off than in 2005.

Why can't mobile follow the same model as desktop?

The desktop distribution model was awful. I wasted many many hours in the past cleaning crapware from family PCs.

To be fair, complain about your family, not the desktop model. Its like babyproofing, the equivalent of no one beeing allowed to buy a steakknife because some people are not grown up enough to handle one carefully.

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.

From talks with colleagues I concluded that these issues were widespread enough to conclude that problem was not my family but the desktop distribution model.

Its definitely widespread, I didnt want to imply it was just your family. There is a large group that cant handle admin rights responsibly. I just dont think general restrictions are in order here. We should much rather educate this group instead of giving up ownership over our devices. Especially since we dont have the appstore model out of security considerations, but because monopolists want to keep people in walled gardens. Ownership of your device is to great of a good to give it up in the name of security.

And society fixed it by voting for the vendors that baby proofed the devices.

Because people don’t want to spend hours uninstalling malware their devices.

It does, you can download an apk and install it on Android.

Don't you have to enable some kind of global special access right? So it's not the same thing.

Yes, and its super hard now. When I installed the new android version the only way I could get fdroid installed was flashing it as a system app in the recovery.

You have to do that on Windows and macOS now as well...

I haven't had to enable some global setting to allow unknown programs on Windows 10. What are you referring to?

Last time I did a fresh install of Windows 10 Home I had to go into Apps & features and disable "Allow apps from the Store only" in order to install Chrome. Didn't seem to have to do that on Windows 10 Pro.

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