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Comment by xtracto | Hacker News Reader

> I can’t understand how we got to this place with “app culture"

Thie assertion is extremely funny to me. Historically we come from an "app culture". Back in the day, around 2000 or so, if you wanted some functionality, you ran an application. You ran software in your computer.

Then on the early 2000s people started migrating their software web" , inventing "SaaS" (software as a service" .

I remember my young self being strongly opposed to that, because I saw little sense in constraining what you could do with a scripting language, when you could easily get the "networking" capabilities adding tcp/ip to your software .

But the web and Javascript won, mostly due to control (there was advertising in software since the 90s, for example Opera or GetRight had ad banners) .

The feature and mobile phones came and people started to migrate to "apps" again. So we came full circle.

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It's because apple pushed towards apps and didn't want web apps on their phone. Likely due to the profits they can gain from appstore sales

Native apps would be the better platform in my eyes if the Operating Systems would be better in terms of letting a user manage what a native app have access to and can do.

But currently they are preferred by companies despite more dev effort because they can get more user data without the user having easy ways to prevent that. And of course showing ads without the user being easily able to block them

There's nothing technical stopping us from investigating and modifying the apps we install - at least on operating systems that allow you to install unapproved apps. YouTube Vanced only got in legal trouble for distributing a copyrighted work (the YouTube app) which led to ReVanced which is a patcher that doesn't include a copy of the original app.

You're not wrong at all, but it's interesting that iOS launched with only web app support for third party software, and it took community pressure to persuade them to support native apps. There was not even an app store to begin with.

Pretty much every single feature added in the early days (and later) of ios was simply copying what was popular on cydia. That well started to run dry as they got better at whack a moleing jailbreaking exploits, severely contracting that community of tweak developers, and we've seen the resulting product stagnation for some time now.

OP is about information, not functionality. In the early 2000s you would put things like that on a web page, and you'd put e.g. chat in its own application like Gaim.

In the 2010s the model inverted: now you need to keep an entire browser open to use google chat, and people try to get you to install an app to read a web page.

Keep going further back, we had thin client terminals (not sure of the terminology, this was just before my time - I remember using them to look for books at our town library when I was a kid, green or orange text on a black screen, no mouse).

"Terminal" will do. These were text user interface (TUI) based browsers accessing a remote database, before web browsers appeared (or even the web itself). Fixed, very limited feature set, talking to database over plain LAN, a dedicated phone line or similar.

Possibly not even that: just a dumb terminal sending keystrokes & displaying text returned by the server.

Setups like this have been around almost as long as computers exist.

I recall that these replaced library catalogs in the form of drawers full of cards. Each card representing a book located elsewhere in the library (or available upon request from a central location). Man I'm old...

I was having that argument with everybody in the late 1990s and was vindicated.

In corporate IT, for instance, you have to roll out new versions of software all the time. There are better solutions for managing desktop fleets than there were back then, but with a web app you just update the server and... you're done!

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