We could be living in a world where no open web ever existed, where everything would be filtered through app stores and closed environments like Facebook (AOL).
We need to preserve the open web, it is our most precious ressource.
Actually for some of them the main difference is that the webapp will push very hard for you to install the app with various popups while the app won't. You're basically being harassed into installing the app.
With this setup though you miss out on the 'benefits' of the notifications :)
But also the official mobile app is atrocious compared to third-party ones..
I believe that putting everything online is not sustainable. It might be very difficult to believe for people who earn so much that they can afford 24/7 stable and fast internet anywhere they go, but there are places where even good old broadband dsl is unstable, in the west.
The reasoning of "appstore bad -> lets not use any appstores" is flawed. There are "appstores" like the ones on FOSS systems like linux (discover on Arch/Manjaro comes to mind), which show that you can make an appstore yourself.
All we need is to build a cross platform, community managed app store, which allows foss and non-foss apps, with a payment system. Thats the solution, not "make it a webapp".
Visit site. Click download app. Click install.
This pattern has worked for 20 years. What changed?
Nothing. Google and apple just decided it wanted a walled garden and ya'll said ooo shiny.
That would be a problem if we would have no choice, but that is not the case.
Then again, app stores haven't solved the malware problem, and neither have solutions like trusted publishers / signing executables / etc. I look forward to seeing a solution that isn't worst-of-both-worlds.
If we’re being honest, some barriers were crossed and the threat evolved
Cryptocurrency might have made it easier, but such scams are older than that. Just look at the whole range of tech support scams based on voucher codes.
That’s the opposite of my experience. I remember lots of malware - toolbars, search engine defaults, using malware bytes, ccleaner, antivirus programs, and a bunch of other crap I can’t remember to de-malware my older relatives’ computers when I was a kid. There was no way to prevent my elders from getting malware on their Windows computers, because they just had to click on everything.
Then iOS came out and I never spent another minute dealing with uninstalling and scanning for malware. Any software problems were solved by deleting the app, or turning the device off and on.
Software repositories? Still not perfect in terms of security but better than manually searching for installer packages, deciding between the official download that requires some account registration or a slightly questionable download site and then hoping for the best. Same for updates - the way many third-party programs on Windows expect me to basically download and reinstall the whole program again unless the developer built their own custom auto-updater is ridiculous.
And for the average user I'd say technologies between flatpak and Snap are a decent step in the right direction - easier installation and updates, less trouble with dependencies(in theory), a bit of isolation and file access limits. Unless you want to explain relatives how to setup Qubes OS this is probably the next best thing within the near future.
And what happened? Did we all die? It's not just the security promise that's unfulfilled, it is also the threats that are way overblown.
Think of a web browser as the ultimate App Store -- you navigate to any "app" by using your search engine of choice or by passing around links to the "apps" via email / messaging. Then, you bookmark your "app" so that it's available with one click.
Offline storage, offline compute, notifications, etc. are all things that we can do via web APIs just as easily as proprietary vendor code.
Sure, some things might need native experiences, but those are definitely the exception, not the rule. Even games and navigation and real-time video can be accomplished via web-only APIs.
You can have a choice in both.
Before smartphones, I was a "tech savvy" computer user. I would install lots of software on my computer from the internet. But I wouldn't necessarily recommend the same for people that looked to me for computer advice. Many people would go to a store and buy a box with a disc in it, which was something you could trust because incentives aligned. Stores would prefer to only carry trustworthy software (in a box) to maintain their reputation as a good store, competitive with other stores. But similarly, I would look to web sites I trusted for my software. The most sophisticated users would look to peer-reviewed, open source software, but this involves knowing either how to review it yourself, or knowing who else to trust as having reviewed it.
Smartphones could've evolved to work like the above, perhaps relying on a USB port for software installs, with options to install directly from developers on the internet, but Apple had already learned from iTunes how to use control to both ensure a pretty good experience for users while also getting a lot of money for it. Google may never have gained enough traction with Android if they didn't build the Play Store and introduce convenience and a sense of trust in that store.
So it's really hard to picture a way that this could've evolved without those stores, such that critical mass was reached on these platforms. It's also hard to envision a strong, competitive alternative. The "masses" choose convenience the vast majority of the time, and they also largely want to trust one source for their software needs. They do not want to figure out whether to trust lots of software providers.
There will always be bad actors who take advantage of concepts like "the open web", so how do you keep things open, but safe and trusted? Can you create a federated system that has "experts you trust" and "peers you trust" and then can go to their recommendations to see which software providers to trust? And wrap that into a pretty tidy interface that everyone can easily adopt? And have the trust system and the device platforms work nicely together to prevent "middle man" attacks?
For a counterexample, Apple has a walled garden that has the properties you want - curated by experts, no sideloading etc. Out and out viruses aren’t common but you still have various kinds of malware that’s hard to remove (and obnoxious in-app adds and dickish dark patterns)
We could be living in a world where the App Store never existed, where everyone could install the software of their choice on the devices they own. Using the web instead of real apps is not the solution.
Are you talking about the PC? Because that sounds a lot like the PC to me :)
There is nothing anywhere that would stop Google just adding websites it doesn't like to the SafeBrowsing blacklist. It's just a social convention that they don't. Yet, social conventions have been repeatedly ripped up over the last 10 years or so by political activists who abuse the word "safe" to mean "ideologically acceptable to us". SafeBrowsing is thus a very dangerous thing because Google's management has shown no ability so far to get a grip on the activist wing of their workforce.
Fortunately, there are two mitigating factors.
One is that Chrome at least on desktop lets you disable SafeBrowsing. Of course, they can change that just as easily as they can change the social norms around how it's used.
Another is that Microsoft has built a successful fork of Chromium. I'm using new Edge on macOS right now. It's not merely using Blink, it's actually Chrome but modified and is very serviceable indeed. In fact they just added vertical tabs. Microsoft seems, at least so far, to have avoided the worst of the culture wars and suspicions of bias. If Google did start to abuse Chrome, people who understood what was happening could quickly switch to Edge. Of course, iOS users are out of luck, as always.
However it may be too fatalistic to assume Android apps cannot be distributed outside the store. I've been hearing "people don't install apps anymore" for years now and it's never motivated with real data, just intuitions and anecdotes. People install apps all the time. The biggest breakout hit of the last decade was Minecraft which violated every aspect of hacker groupthink at once: desktop-first, no mobile version, distributed outside app stores, written in Java, no VC backing. I think people talk themselves into believing this isn't possible, but if people want to install an app, they'll do it. Companies that believe they can't survive without app store distribution are typically offering something completely undifferentiated. I don't know how many dating services there are for the polyamorous but I guess there can't be that many. All it takes on Android is to tick a single box and you can install apps (I'm not sure how they can self-update, but nothing stops you dynamically downloading code into your app on Android).
You can download apk files and install them. Windows users used (and still do, I suppose) to just download and install programs for decades. It's not ideal, but it works.
As for windows it's rather surprising that Microsoft hasn't tried harder to get more of a walled garden going given they were never shy of anticompetitive behaviour and mostly stems from expectations grandfathered in.