It’s already not true on mobile generally. No view source, no extensions, no user injected scripts. You get the page the server wants you to see.
iOS: adblockers are natively supported through "content blockers", plus there's a plethora of adblock browsers
That said, because ads are inserted by third parties, you can often block ads with DNS and/or VPN. It’s a shame that iOS has never allowed changing the DNS while on mobile networks, though.
Really though, I miss when we were building open standards for content though, like RSS and podcasts.
Feels like a different era of the Internet, as we never saw an open standard take off for ChromeCast/AirPlay2 or the mentioned-on-stage open standards for FaceTime. Even the RIAA is trying to lock down music again by promoting MQA (Tidal) over FLAC (HDtracks, Amazon).
Closest thing to “open” that I can think of recently for content would be HLS streaming, which optionally supports encryption, but is otherwise open to use or implement.
Given recent history, I think it could go either way, but I doubt users will ever fully accept a closed web, so as long as the web provides open alternatives on every platform, we’ll still be in the clear... for now. :)
Without that, it’s becoming increasingly less useful IMO.
I use Brave, is there another someone likes more?
The only reason that's possible is because of open web standards though so the point still stands.
Only if the app uses SFSafariViewController.
Whatever it takes to maintain control.
I don't know if anyone has tried. It's definitely possible, though.
I used to play some of those predatory mobile games. At some point I got sick of their addictive "daily tasks" game design and decided to automate all of it. I intercepted the game's network traffic: it was just JSON. Didn't take long to write software to talk to the server and do the tasks for me.
Any code that's running on the client can be tampered with or replaced. It's probably not going to be easy but it's certainly possible.
> WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram
WhatsApp is already among the best messaging services. It doesn't really do anything that would motivate people to replace it with something better. Having custom software which lacks the remote message deletion feature would be interesting but it would be too much work for too little gain.
I don't use Facebook and Instagram enough to have an opinion.
Most of the websites I produce do not have ads on them. I don't make much money, but I do make some and it's better than it used to be. I'm hopeful that there will be more of a trend towards small content producers making enough to survive and we can begin to crowd out the "cancer" that is some of the worst commercialized stuff.
It doesn't have to go away completely. We can just refuse to let it choke everything.