Most people install the app, and all the tracking and data collection and geolocation that comes with it. Soon, almost all mass media will be consumed this way. This is just the latest installment of the mounting assault on the free and open web.
Mark my words: the web is in danger.
In a way yes.
In another way you can always trust people to be stupid and greedy and poison the commons: Every day you'll see more and more stories about apps that get taken over by/sold to malicious actors that then infect your device with the latest virus/ads/ransomware.
People don't care if their private data is sold all over the world, that's clear by now, but people will care, cry and shout really loudly when they get infected by ransomware that holds their grandkids pictures hostage.
It will happen, and the vector will always be a rogue app. Welcome back to the web!
I also fear that with the increase in nationalism around the world, and cyber warfare becoming more serious, that even traditionally liberal governments will start exerting more control on their networks. Specifically, not just to protect strategic interests, but to restrict ideas. Particularly since foreign governments have begun to use social networks for propaganda purposes.
Is it? The protocols and the technologies are open and standardized. You're perfectly capable of registering a DNS name, hooking up a server to the network and starting a HTTP daemon. Big companies can't stop you from doing that.
"But nobody is doing that today! Too much hassle!", I hear you saying.
Ah! You have a point... but that's based on a bias. You're switching cause and effect. Why are billions able to post content on the Web? Because that's what big platforms allow them to do. There implementation simply has lowered the bar for a huge influx of non-technical people to start publishing content.
The trade-off these millions are making is giving up on their privacy, or having to endure the rules and weird quirks, towards those that own and operate the platforms that they are using.
Publishing content on the Web never was easy to begin with. Tim Berners-Lee originally invented HTTP because he simply wanted to connect researchers and share scientific knowledge. Most of the tools that power the Web were never designed for end users. They are designed for robustness, performance, security and so on.
The only merit of Zuckerberg and Jack is that they used to tools in such a way to abstract that complexity away for end users. Exactly like what Bill Gates and Steve Jobs did by providing windowing systems with a visual language that was easy to understand for end users.
Yelling "the Web is in danger" would be like yelling "computers are in danger" because billions of users never learned to use command line tools, don't know what a kernel is, let alone understand what a file system is.
The free and open Web was and always will be an affair of people who have an understanding of open, standardized technologies such as HTML, CSS, HTTP, URL's, TCP/IP and so on. You can't have one without the other, really. Freedom and openness are a function of the distribution of knowledge to implement and enforce them.
Now, the real problem, at this point, isn't technological. It's regulatory. The real problem is that these platforms don't have a proper paid offering for users who want to share and publish content. Because end users, like you and me, aren't the customer, they are the product for advertisers. And so consumer and - at this point - civil rights don't seem to apply to them. That's what really matters here.
But that problem is only a problem caused because those very same platforms allowed millions to enter this virtual world. Equally, expecting that anyone - including your grandparents - learns HTML and how to set up an Apache webserver, well, that might equally a bridge too far, no?
If ISP's decided to stop supporting open standards and switched to proprietary protocols to link computers, that's when you need to ask questions. And this has been tried... and failed already in a different form some 30 to 40 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel