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Comment by bhawks | Hacker News Reader

When iPhone and Android hit the scene the 'rich' web experience was primarily flash, silverlight, and some java applets (taking their last breathe).

Input APIs for touch, multitouch and gesture were a mess for many years in the browser.

Media queries didn't become a w3c recommendation until 2012 so building a ux that looked pleasant really wasn't possible.

The memory, cpu, GPU, storage and battery constraints were unbelievably tight.

In short mobile hardware and the iOS and Android SDK environments were consumer + developer ready for practically 10 years before the web was ready for mobile.

The real question is how did the web remain relevant while being so far behind this tectonic platform shift?

I think major points that kept the web alive: content addressibility (via urls), ease of connectivity between content (via links), vast amounts of information already in the platform, smoother learning curve for developer technology, and the vast amounts of money/influence Google was willing to put in to keep it's search ads property relevant.

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> The real question is how did the web remain relevant while being so far behind this tectonic platform shift?

We didn't all shift to to smartphones the instant they became available. It took a while for people to transition to smartphones. Likewise getting an app up and running (in addition to their websites) took time for most businesses, and many probably waited before jumping on the band wagon

I am sure everyone on HN moved quickly, but for the rest of the non-tech world I am sure they were doing just fine using their home computer for several more years.

Even now, I still think "I'll wait and do this on a proper computer". It's not like apps have solved all computing-ills - many are total garbage with bugs and/or poorly thought through designs.

What transition? Mobile is the lite version.

> I am sure everyone on HN moved quickly, but for the rest of the non-tech world I am sure they were doing just fine using their home computer for several more years.

A whole generation of people in India never used Computers as the western population did but large majority of same people directly moved to smartphones.

"I am sure everyone on HN moved [from computers to smartphones] quickly"

I may be wrong, but I suspect you have that backwards. My guess is that at least older HNers were slower to shift from powerful but complex creation tools (computers) to easy consumption toys (smartphones) designed for consumers who found computers with files and folders just too darned complicated to use. Until good, portable mapping and good-enough cameras came along, I had no use for the "smart" features of a phone that were vastly inferior to the smart features of a real computer. For a long time, all I needed from a phone was the phone, which a small flip phone handled just fine. For anything "smart", I used the laptop & real camera in my backpack.

I suspect everyone is wrong, but we're all subject to an availability bias.

We assume that things we actively notice other people doing in public are representative of what everyone (or everyone in some category to which we've assigned that person) is doing. We don't notice all the people not engaging in that behavior because they're not noteworthy.

==We assume that things we actively notice other people doing in public are representative of what everyone (or everyone in some category to which we've assigned that person) is doing. We don't notice all the people not engaging in that behavior because they're not noteworthy.==

Doesn’t this comment include it’s own set of biases?

Such as?

I think that what they were getting at is that people noticing and commenting on things is more noticeable than people not doing so.

Which would imply that there's a tendency to notice the noticing more than the not noticing, and, as a consequence, over-estimate how often people do it.

It's a good point.

I really dislike the 'consumption device' label, to me it seems lazily dismissive and missing the point. Smartphones, like phones, are primarily communication devices and communication is an active process. Texting/chat, email, audio calls, Twitter, Slack, Teams, Reddit, facebook, Discord, snapchat, etc, etc are all interactive communications media people use to create content for as well as 'consume'. Yes of course they're also used to watch videos and memes, read web sites, listen to podcasts and audiobooks. Sure, but active engagement is the killer feature for these things.

Go to any commuter train on a Monday morning and look what every last one of those people seated in the car are doing.

They're consuming, not interacting. It is not lazy nor is it dismissive to suggest smartphones are largely devices that inspire consumption. It's just a proper observation.

If there billions of consumers and just 1 in 1000 creates something then we have millions of creators

That's neither relevant to the point under discussion (the primary function of the device), nor a valid defense of the smartphone (which should be judged on its intrinsic merits, not whether a tiny fraction of people manage to use it productively solely as a statistical consequence of Earth's vast population).

Of course they get used for that, but I think it's a mistake saying that because they are consumption devices therefore HN crowd would have limited use for them. That's not how that works. In two different people's hands the same device brings completely different value. I got an iPhone in 2008 and since then have used them heavily as communications devices and that's where the main value for me is.

The same goes for the comment about iPhones being 'designed for consumers'. They were designed to be easy to use, but that in no way means they were under powered or less capable because of those design considerations. Again, that's not how that works. Powerful or easy to use is a false dichotomy.

They're incredibly powerful tools and mistaking a major, even the major use case for being defining of the tool (therefore everyone uses it this way, or therefore that's where the main value lies, or therefore these people here wouldn't use them) is fallacious. There are 'influencers' who have built fortunes almost entirely on their phones.

> They're consuming, not interacting. It is not lazy nor is it dismissive to suggest smartphones are largely devices that inspire consumption.

This is also probably one of the reasons TikTok took off; it allows high quality content creation via smartphone that anyone can do.

Crashing before consuming is also why personal tech in the 80s and 90s had a very different kind of following.

> Smartphones, like phones, are primarily communication devices and communication is an active process.

Yeah… no. Maybe for some people, but I primarily use it as a consumption device. But then, I don’t use social media, I don’t answer my phone (I listen to voicemails once a day and choose whether I want to respond or not). I don’t use any work apps on my phone, like slack.

The real irony of the smartphone situation is that if you are older HNer, you will return to flip phone, real camera and laptop and never go any further, until proven FOSS solution is available on the market. Smartphones were designed from the get go as a surveillance economy devices, catered to minimal the computing needs of the mass audience.:)

Down-voting cannot remove the true of the statement.

Using corporate censored devices is not making you free or enlightened in any way. We are approaching real danger in the tech community where criticism and non-conforming to the gospel trends are becoming the norm.

You are very right.

Once you are used to the power/freedom available on a Laptop/Desktop Computer you could never get comfortable with the restrictions on a Smartphone. The latter is for less tech-savvy people and almost always used as a media consumption device.

I feel you have this completely backwards. I think for the vast majority of non-tech users, the smartphone was their first everyday computer.

Anecdotally, that's not what I witnessed for family members 30+, but it has been the case for the younger generation (< 20).

A vast majority of young adults had their own everyday computers before smartphones. Today young adults gets smartphones instead, yes, but that didn't use to be true.

Kids use computers regularly at school from a very young age.

>We didn't all shift to to smartphones the instant they became available.

Oh, yes we did. Within 3 years (say 2007-2010) it was game over for feature-phones for the mass population, whereas the state of web APIs was still bad.

> Even now, I still think "I'll wait and do this on a proper computer".

I'm routinely in the same boat, though it's less about the computer and more about not fighting with a tiny monitor. Most things built for mobile are "light" versions, as easily exposing all the bells and whistles on a 6" monitor would be a UI nightmare.

Tiny monitor, obnoxious keyboard. I haven't enjoyed typing on a phone since I reluctantly (that word took me 5 tries) set down my Lumia 920 Windows phone.

Also my mouse is (insert big number) times more precise than my index finger.

I use a NexDock from time to time for this; some of my Galaxy S20's stock software scales pretty well to a full-size display as they expect you to use one.

I don't think I'd make my phone my primary machine despite this until Linux phones are daily-driver ready for me though. The mobile OS is still too limiting.

(That and while the NexDock is serviceable, its touchpad is awful. Good enough to use occasionally, but I wouldn't want to be stuck with it as my main machine.)

> Most things built for mobile are "light" versions.

The good sites are :)

The not so good ones "force" you to download an app with no alternative and require obtrusive permissions even though all you want to know is the answer to a quick question.

You think it's the tiny monitor, but it's really the primitive UI designed for caveman-style point-and-grunt. I've been using a GPD Micro PC extensively over the past few months, which is equipped with a 6" screen, but also - critically - a touchpad and physical thumb keyboard. Guess what, I can do programming, CAD, image editing, the works - everything you can do on a larger machine.

The Micro PC proves that we were sold a myth; that dumbed-down UIs were a necessary evil to enjoy computers in our pockets. They aren't. Pocket sized laptops work amazingly.

That's interesting to me because I've been seeing some people impatient for the PinePhone external keyboard, but I've felt strong doubts I'd use one much.

You might be right. Having also spent time with the Cosmo Communicator, I can vouch that a phone with a keyboard isn't the same thing as a phone-sized laptop. Apart from the hostile platform (which hopefully wouldn't be an issue on the PinePhone), two aspects that make the phone less practical for desktop software are the extremely high aspect ratio, and the lack of any sort of mouse input beyond poking at the screen. These things significantly compromise the desktop experience.

However, I will also say that a touch-type keyboard on a phone is still awesome, and I will certainly be buying a PinePhone+keyboard when it comes out. I live in forlorn hope for the day I can evict Android from my life entirely (the Micro PC does not, alas, make phone calls).

Thanks for spelling out some issues.

Yeah, the inherent fatness of fingers problem. And the lack of buttons on those fingers other-problem.

Looking at the resolutions, 1280x720 vs 1440x720, I would have just expected the phone experience not to feel terribly different. Of course it remains to be seen how much the PinePhone software adapts to landscape in wake of the keyboards coming.

The apotheosis of the netbook? How does it perform with external keyboard, mouse and monitor?

Edit: I've been a fan of the netbook concept since well before the term was coined, when the Toshiba Portegé first came out. But my experiences with them, like everyone else, were disappointing. I'd love it if these new units had good performance.

I mean, it's a quad core mobile Intel with 8 gigabytes. It feels snappy. It runs KDE Plasma. Thermals aren't spectacular, and you won't be running any AAA games on it, but it's vastly more capable than the netbooks of yore. I tend to keep it throttled to 6 watts, which means I can keep the fan off all the time.

Get a larger screen and a keyboard (bluetooth typically), and you'll still find you're fighting the platform.

- Memory management means that whatever application you're using at any given moment can vanish, with all its user state.

- Applications are crippled versions of full-desktop variants, where they exist at all. E.g., FennecFox vs. the Firefox browser. Support for user-empowering extensions is limited.

- You. Will. Not. Have. Root. Some devices are rootable. Many are not. This means that whole sections of the OS are not available to you.

- Information is siloed into applicationd databases (inaccessable on the device, since You. Will. Not. Have. Root. --- or worse, maintained on some distant cloud server.)

- The OS itself is not upgradable by you. Android device vendors often provide absolutely no post-purchase OS updates.

- Even power kits are very third-class citizens. Termux, The Only Android App That Does Not Precisely Suck[TM], is useful and powerful but its 1,400 packages are only a minuscule fraction of those available on a full Linux system (Debian contains over 60,000 packages), and are limited in functionality as You. Will. Not. Have. Root.

Numerous affordances and capabilities are simply missing or buggy as all hell.

Using an ebook reader, as an example, with an external keyboard, I cannot enter a space character into a search field as that scrolls the screen rather than editing the search dialogue. Just one of many, many, many cuts in a death by thousands.

Source: Have used Android for over a decade, tablets for over five years.

The existence of the tablet shows that it's not the device size but rather the app experience that's the limiting factor.

I've tried using an iPad but it's no match for the power, control and flexibility of a full desktop/laptop device, and the larger iPad has an even bigger screen than some smaller notebooks.

>Even now, I still think "I'll wait and do this on a proper computer".

Of all the things that makes me prefer a proper computer, the shenanigans that devs do with various SDKs that are privacy invading pieces of shit have put me off of trusting any apps. Because of the all of the information that makes a mobile device so convenient to use is precisely the data that makes privacy invading data collection so desirable, it will be imposible to ever make it a serious compute platform for me.

For me, the mobile platform is primarily used as the Bar Bet Settler 5000(TM).

This. I can even give a concrete example of it. I noticed a charge to my bank account from Amazon and knew I didn’t buy anything. I went to the Amazon app and saw there were no orders. I thought maybe my prime renewed today so o tried to find that on mobile. I could not find it easily so I immediately went to my laptop and found it in 2 clicks via the Amazon website. To me the web is really great when there is enough screen real estate to keep information out of nested menus.

> I am sure everyone on HN moved quickly

This is me. For years my employer offered to get me a phone, but I declined. Why would I want a mobile phone. I don’t want people to get ahold of me whenever they want. But, then that first iPhone came out that was actually a full-fledged computer with phone capabilities on the side. I immediately jumped on that.

I would agree with you if not for the fact that a lot of these popular "native apps" are just webpages within a native wrapper, which kind of defeats your argument.

Brands and vendors don't like the web because often they cannot 100% control what browsers do, and of course, a browser website cannot get access to the whole contact list, phone numbers and files on a phone device unlike a native app...

Installing an app via an appstore on mobile is low friction. Good luck getting someone to install your Windows or MacOS app on your desktop...

Even PWA that were all at rage a few years ago, called a replacement for native apps by the dev community, how many here have a single PWA installed on their desktop computer?

I would say that in the beginning most apps weren’t that way- precisely because of the issues with building rich web apps. Now that it’s possible to replicate a lot of the “native” feel on the web, more apps are choosing the “wrap in a webview” approach as it vastly simplifies the development process across web and multiple mobile/desktop platforms.

Agreed on the control- another thing to consider at least in this crowd is that Safari content filters (aka ad blockers) aren’t applied in apps.

>I would agree with you if not for the fact that a lot of these popular "native apps" are just webpages within a native wrapper, which kind of defeats your argument.

This doesn't seem true at all. What popular "native" apps are you talking about? The most popular native apps couldn't exist on the web on the early days. YouTube couldn't work on the web due to the dependence on Flash. Instagram couldn't exist without camera access (and arguably fast image processing which JS couldn't do at the time). The technology to build some of the most downloaded apps like Words With Friends or Angry Birds could not be done on the web.

Amazon's app is an example.

PWAs were crippled by the mobile operating system vendor with 60% of the mobile OS marketshare in the US. PWAs didn't happen because Apple doesn't want them to compete fairly with native apps on iOS.

> Brands and vendors don't like the web because often they cannot 100% control (...)

App permissions exist to do the same for native apps.

> The real question is how did the web remain relevant while being so far behind this tectonic platform shift?

Not sure it is relevant anymore for a non-trivial chunk of people - at least in mobile. Lately I have quite often needed to explain about a good web app accessible in browser but not in app store. And I am a bit bewildered. The amount of people pretty much unable to distinguish between browser, app store and url is... not too small. (And don't get me started about iphone users' understanding why their location services "do not work" in safari. I assume there is a difference in default permissions there between iphone and abdroid there)

I don't have an iPhone, can you expand on that location services part? Does Safari not show the permission popup when a website asks for it or something?

On Android, websites can request location permissions, you can't access any of that stuff by default.

Not sure what op meant, but most computers don't come with built in GPS. Location services rely on other indicators of location, which are far less precise.

Firefox lets you specify your location, though not easily. (Set `geo.provider.network.url` to `data:application/json,{"location":{"lat":0.00000,"lng":0.00000},"accuracy":1000}`.) Chrome doesn't, so even sites with location permission place me at my ISP's HQ 500 miles away.

I do not have iphone either, but based on my observations many (most?) iphone owners have disabled safari location services from the os side, so you can't just allow them from the permission popup, but you need to go to the os settings and enable them for safari before you can bypass the permission popup. Again, I do not own an iphone, so not sure if it is exactly like this, but something like that needs to be done in many iohones trying to access location data from safari.

I wish I could do that on macOS so I stop getting hit with pop ups in Safari asking me for my location. Homedepot.com is particularly annoying about this.

It does not stop the pop ups. Safari asks from you permission for location services, you tap ok, and you get an error message that says getting location services failed.

You can go to safari preferences>websites>location and set "when visiting other sites" to "deny". I don't get any popups that way.

Oh thanks!

Use a browser that doesn't purposely nag you for permissions like Safari does. Firefox fits the bill for me, and doesn't throw nagging pop ups at me all of the time.

> The real question is how did the web remain relevant while being so far behind this tectonic platform shift?

Because CSS +HTML + JS is 20x easier to learn than any mobile code language. Anyone in a few hours can create a website, that has never been the case for mobile apps.

You can even create a basic website by copy pasting some html template and modifying the content with notepad.

As a result - as long as Google doesn't decide to deprecate HTML and CSS because it doesn't suit their complex requirements - the web is assured that much more people will be able to create website than apps. When you look at Kotlin or Swift, HTML looks like a no-code language

Expo.dev makes mobile app development pretty easy.

Even today, in the year 2021, browsers do not have native support for gestures which are ubiquitous in the touch screen world.

To pan/pinch/swipe you either need to implement it yourself or use a JS library like Hammer which adds unnecessary bloat.

Don't do this without a good reason. We finally got a lot of mobile sites rendering good and you want to take that away.

A good reason is simply that gestures are a staple of mobile UIs.

1. It's a good thing that you have to implement them yourself. A lot of this stuff is super arbitrary.

2. Opera had gestures 15+ years ago and it was glorious for those that liked them

> content addressibility

I'd say the app ecosystem promotes closed content whereas WWW promotes open content.

What open content? Wikipedia? That's <1% of the Web.

If we're judging whether the Web promotes open content by the actual results after three decades, the exact opposite is the case: the Web promotes closed content.

Netflix, ESPN, Google/Gmail/Maps/News/etc, Microsoft/Bing/Office/mail/etc, NYTimes, Washington Post, USA Today, MSNBC, CNBC, Reuters, AP, CNN, Bloomberg, FoxNews, ABC, CBS, NBC, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Imgur, eBay, Amazon/Twitch/Prime/etc, Target, Walmart, ETSY, Disney, Viacom, Verizon/Yahoo, Match.com, Quora, PayPal. Along with pretty much all corporate sites and porn sites. Most blogs are privately owned, copyrighted; same with substacks; same with most mailing lists. Most photography on the Web is owned by someone, and captive on a platform. Travel sites/services (Booking, Expedia, etc), review sites/services (Yelp, Trip Advisor, most cooking sites, etc), weather sites, real-estate sites (Realtor.com, Zillow, Apartments.com, etc); ticket sites (Vivid, Stubhub, Ticketmaster, Live Nation) - they're largely in the same box, they're all privately owned, copyrighted content, closed corporate platforms.

Now keep going with that list for most of the next 5,000+ largest sites (with few exceptions like Wikipedia or Stack Exchange).

Nearly everything on the Web is centralized, closed, privately owned, copyrighted content and or platforms. They're all little walled gardens.

uhm... everything? "open" as in anyone can make a website and if it's has one good article, it will show up in some google query's result.

> "open" as in anyone can make a website

Anyone can make an app too.

> if it's has one good article, it will show up in some google query's result.

Maybe buried deep in the 100th page, but not the front.

> Anyone can make an app too.

After they install some bloated IDE, learn some "tech", and pay the gatekeepers

> Maybe buried deep in the 100th page

But they can be found and share, as opposed to apps of a non existent category where average people publish what they are working on, their thoughts, or whatever. App Store and Google Play search would crumble at the scale of the number of websites in existence right now (~2 billions). Remember that search engines index what's inside those websites too not just their name and description.

> After they install some bloated IDE, learn some "tech", and pay the gatekeepers

Tell me how making and hosting a website is absolutely free.

You could not make this argument even 10 years ago, when you could absolutely make a sites on any of wordpress, tumblr, yahoo or blogspot completely free. These days there are even more choices ranging from WYCIWYG (Squarespace & the like) to absolutely free full CI/CD-ed platforms (heroku, Zeit, GitHub pages...). It's not like there is a duopoly on web hosting.

But I guess the more important aspect of the word "free" is that no one could gatekeep you from making a website, unlike app stores where there is a review process.

> Anyone can make an app too.

On iOS, this is only true if they're in good standing with Apple and have their approval, while also paying the yearly $100 Apple tax.

All hosting providers or app platforms also have a ""tAX""

Wait till you find out about paying for bandwidth.

This is hacker news, none of us has heard of nor care about the highly technical details you speak of

Open as in no spyware required.

Uhhhhhhhh do you think websites have no ““spyware””?

Have you heard of biscuits?

In their defense they did say required.

You've been able to turn off cookies since the beginning in any sort of competent browser.

And you’ve been able to allow or deny apps individual permissions on any sort of competent OS.

I think, since we're talking mobile here, the implication is that the OS is part of the spyware here.

Or I completely screwed up my understanding of this thread. That's also very possible.

Firefox ships with Enhanced Tracking Protection enabled by default, disabling those tracking cookies and other trackers from the first time you launch the browser[1].

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote...

The protocol. Websites are accessible over a known , open protocol to every visitor, (Geofencing etc is there, but...), but apps use proprietary protocols which only the particular app can decode. You can see the ESPN website on any old browser, but the ESPN app content needs the ESPN app, and nothing else will work.

Open protocols don't make open sites or apps.

Cases in point: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (increasingly closed), Reddit (increasingly closed). All of them have sites built on open protocols.

It's <1% of the viewed web maybe (I don't know that for sure, but let's stipulate).

But open content is not 1% of the existing web; there are more than a billion[1] websites, and anybody can make one.

You might not easily be able to find those websites (currently, there's still a good chance you might, via the major search engines, but that is subject to corporate hegemony, state actor malfeasance, shit-flooding the zone, etc).

But I think the ability to "put it out there" counts for most of the definition of "open".

Being able to consume content on your terms is also cool, but not as fundamental as being able to produce it.

[1]: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ — https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+many+websites+are+there+in+the...

Open in this context means open to access without platform preference. If you can access it with Firefox on Linux then in this context it's open.

The app ecosystem promotes closed content only because it requires native code to run for the UX people expect on mobile, at least until recently with responsive UIs dominating the web framework space.

> When iPhone and Android hit the scene the 'rich' web experience was primarily flash, silverlight, and some java applets (taking their last breathe).

A lot of people have forgot that YouTube were using FLV (video streaming using Flash) during a lot of time because there wasn't any better multiplatform viable alternative.

You are totally right. The web wasn't ready for new universal types of information exchanges and we needed to use 3rd parties to solve that, in form of a Flash plug-in or an installed app.

I’d argue that it’s having to do with standards bodies too. The time it takes for many to agree on standardized APIs for mobile. Apple and Google can simply say: “this is our native API” and people will use it quickly and effectively. Also there’s incentive for Apple to keep people on their platform and standards are tangential.

Also, desktop browsers have been around for over 30 years, and hence the click, double click, scroll, and basic key shortcut metaphors have as well.

webOS was from the same ~2009 era, powering the Palm/HP Pre models, and its apps were developed in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It had a huge selection of 3rd party and open source apps developed using web technologies.

This was the case for the first iteration of the iPhone, as well.

The truth is that the web didn't flourish on mobile because the two mobile operating systems giants knew that they could make a killing by keeping a stranglehold on the mobile app distribution market with their app store models. And they did so successfully for a decade, making tens of billions of dollars each year from said stranglehold.

Giving the web equal footing on their mobile operating systems like webOS did would put those billions of dollars of yearly revenue at risk.

> The real question is how did the web remain relevant while being so far behind this tectonic platform shift?

this is an "apples vs oranges" question

> the vast amounts of money/influence Google was willing to put in to keep it's search ads property relevant

Mobile search ad clicks have been surpassing desktop search for a while now, If it was done solely through Google app and if iOS wasn't a thing then Google would have happily killed the web by this time.

I think instant apps is(was?) an attempt at it.

Also I think the app "look up random info and articles" was never lost for the mobile web. I don't think there are many apps for that even now. Yes there is the wikipedia and other such apps, but they are a sliver of the web.

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