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Comment by fidotron | Hacker News Reader

I'm of the view this is a lot of fuss about nothing. Big deal if people prefer apps over the "open" web. The reality is a large number of people use the likes of MSN and Yahoo as web home pages, and unless you were linked to from them they were unlikely to find you. The app launcher situation is an improvement over that.

The big problem is that dipping your toes into something via a website (assuming you don't hit an auth wall) is easier than finding then downloading an app.

Besides, a lot of these "web" apps are just things like Facebook or G+ which are no more open to scraping or any of the other supposed benefits of an open web than your average iOS or Android mobile clients are. The web has morphed into an unholy mix of the worst qualities of everything else.

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It's not a scrapeability problem; it's a freedom problem. The article mentions this. Why should the app stores decide what can and cannot be on our phones, and why should they add a 30% tax on everything that is published on mobile? There are a lot of claims that the tech industry is disrupting the big music and books businesses, for the benefit of consumers, but these new players are acting like the middlemen they are replacing.

The web reduces the distance between content consumers and producers, cutting out the middleman. It's not a perfect solution. Standards are greatly influenced by commercial interests. But it's better than a locked-down app store oligopoly.

Apple and Google gets to act as middle men because their app store provides value to the end user.

Users are free to use the mobile browser on their phones but most of the time native apps are a better experience. And guess who develops the framework and tools to create these value-adding native apps.

This is the free market at work.

>This is the free market at work

The free market sometimes leads to a not-so-free market, which is ultimately bad for consumers. This is the entire reason there is anti-trust law.

But there's not an anti-trust situation with app stores: Apple, Microsoft and Google all maintain their own app stores. No, they don't let anyone else operate an app store on their mobile platform, but other companies are free to create their own mobile platforms if they don't like that. Apple and Google aren't doing anything illegal to stop other mobile platforms from existing; it's just that users really don't want another platform right now.

>But there's not an anti-trust situation with app stores

I am not saying that there are current or even future anti-trust issues with app stores. I was simply using that analogy to illustrate that the "free market" can move in a direction that is less free to an extent that is negative for consumers. This can happen because consumers are free to choose.

In other words, that anti-trust laws exist and have been employed to combat this is simply offered as evidence that the great-grandparent post above overlooks the fact that the free market can lead to reduced choice for consumers.

Amazon operates a fork of android, not sure if you count that in.

How about letting me to decide what I want on my phone? And if I prefer apps to the ad-ridden, third-party-tracking-code infested web pages, so be it?

>And if I prefer apps to the ad-ridden, third-party-tracking-code infested web pages, so be it

Cool. And now, I'd like to introduce you to the world of ad-ridden, third-party-tracking-code infested apps.

Just so you know, apps are also using any number of third party tracking services, and many are also ad-ridden.

Not to mention that apps usually have more/deeper access to your personal information.

Some apps are at least as evil. And, like Web pages, most of the evil comes from ad support in the apps.

Google could go quite far to fix this by enabling users to selectively turn off permissions, and requiring developers to handle SecurityException.

>Why should the app stores decide what can and cannot be on our phones

This is not a freedom problem. You have the freedom to buy an Android device, and you have the freedom to install any apk you want without ever even opening the Google app store. Moreover, Google even allows 3rd party app stores on their devices.

And of course these new players are acting as middlemen, but you are forgetting the fundamental difference, and this is what has changed the game. Anybody can publish their app, virtually for free. There are no gatekeepers, who decide what gets published and what doesn't, anymore.

>There are no gatekeepers, who decide what gets published and what doesn't, anymore.

Except Apple.

All of that is patently false:

You can't publish any App on the Apple AppStore but only those that are kid-friendly.

You can't publish a shopping app on Apple's AppStore for free - you have to hand over all of your margin to Apple.

Apple is a gatekeeper. They decide what gets published and what doesn't.

What am I missing?

    There are no gatekeepers, who decide what gets published
    and what doesn't, anymore.

Apple routinely rejects applications to their App store. Have you not read any of the numerous stories where app devs get denied?

    This is not a freedom problem. You have the freedom to
    buy an Android device, and you have the freedom to install
    any apk you want without ever even opening the Google app 
    store.

The freedom to do something like "install any app via .apk" may exist, but it is still a "freedom problem" when there's a large barrier to installing an .apk on your device. I'm speculating of course, but real world anecdotes would lead me to believe that a very small % of the population even knows what an APK is.

>Apple routinely rejects applications to their App store. Have you not read any of the numerous stories where app devs get denied?

Yes, I am aware. And yes, you are right. But the gatekeeping on the app stores has nothing to do with the music, movie or even book industry. Could they be more lenient? Yes, but you can't denied that the game has indeed changed.

>I'm speculating of course, but real world anecdotes would lead me to believe that a very small % of the population even knows what an APK is.

I would say that you are right again. And you are also right, maybe this is a debate about freedom, but personally, I don't consider having to go to settings, security and checking a box, a large barrier to freedom. If you actually seek freedom, it's only a few (acceptable) steps away.

Sure, you have the freedom to install any apps you want.

However, if I am starting a business, and most people don't know how to exercise that freedom to install an app from somewhere else, I am not going to get very far in my business if this is what is required for my end users to use my program. Therefore, I am not going to invest time in developing anything that requires that sort of installation, making it practically the same as not being able to do that at all.

But you make it sound more like an education problem than a freedom problem.

The issue is not that people are not allowed to install apks, the problem is that people don't know how to exercise that freedom.

Disagree. First of all, Google's practices aren't the norm, and might not remain the norm. Second of all, merely making and supporting your app multiple times for different platforms using their different visual / interaction idioms is a large economic effect. Even with cross-platform mobile frameworks, unless you decide not to test / support platforms other than your main one.

Standards are good because they bridge this gap. C runs on everything, e-mail runs on everything, the web runs on everything. Mobile web, for the most part, runs on everything.

edit: For the record, I do think that the mobile web standards need more work, but they're quite good at this point, and adoption is much better than 2 years ago. I'd like to see open standards for push notifications, for example (apparently there is some work done: http://www.w3.org/TR/push-api/).

That argument definitely doesn’t work for Apple but it also doesn’t really work for Google.

Yeah, installing any apk is possible, but hard to do. Any apks and apps in the app store are a million miles from being on equal footing.

i dont get why its considered hard to install an apk.. u download it and run it..and android will say u need to tick some box to install this and u do.. and then it installs.. people download and install windows software all the time, it works almost the same...

Actually, it's more like a 43% tax (assuming a 30/70 split).

What about traffic from Google?

For any existng online platform that's already established itself on the web, you're probably seeing 50%+ of your traffic coming from Google and a big chunk of that will be mobile. Some of your userbase may be loyal enough to your brand to want to install your app but the rest will be lost if you don't have a decent mobile web presence.

In short: apps vs mobile web? Both

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