Amazon and Android forks
ben-evans.com
ben-evans.com
I have big issues with Microsoft, Apple and Google. Obviously, there are concerns with Amazon, too, but they aren't as significant for me. They stem mostly from not being able to read anonymously, and from the concern of DRM and the potential issues with Amazon being able to revoke the Kindle books you purchase.
Amazon's basic business model is not focused on surveillance or putting all your data in the cloud or vendor lock in. This is a big plus these days.
Amazon also is in the interesting position of probably being able to disrupt literally all commercial and retail business in the next couple years, which I am personally hugely excited for. It will be interesting to see who the heck buys this, and how they are able to operate without Google, iOS apps, what have you.
Maybe we will soon have a major tech company promoting Open Street Maps. Amazon will be in a position to offer a lot of products that other companies can't. Right now, though, I wouldn't touch the Google Play stack with a 10-foot-pole.
While we could debate what "basic business models" means, Amazon more than anyone wants to understand your life in hopes of selling you everything you might ever want. That is their business. They have as great a motivation to try to mine your existence than the other companies.
My response is that I'm not really trying to not be marketed to, I'm just trying to be not surveilled. If a company wants to market to people who are trying to avoid surveillance, I'll support them, as long as they don't surveil me to figure that out.
Amazon could do that. Google can't. Apple probably could, but they're pretty heavily invested in cloud stuff at this point. Microsoft is, well, Microsoft.
Everything else apart, while this is a reasonable concern, it is also an addressable concern.
The Amazon DRM is weak, known and can be decrypted. It take minimal research to set this up, and then circumvention is merely a click away.
This means that while Amazon some time in the future can revoke your access to purchases you've made for whatever reason (even though I doubt they will), they cannot revoke you from using the DRM-free copies you've created once you've stripped the DRM from your original purchases.
"But Feds, I paid for this copy, just stripped the DRM off of it."
It's easy to break the technological norms that protect books. It's a lot tougher to break the cultural ones.
You can address this concern technologically, but can you do it culturally?
Not to mention, what happens when you forget to strip out the DRM and Amazon [revokes your books.](http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/some-e-books-are-m...)
Are you really suggesting that you strip the DRM out from every book your purchase from Amazon? (Though, feel free not to incriminate yourself on the internet while responding.)
Same for digital goods and digital devices/appliances. I want open formats and the ability to flash open firmware.
Lucky for me, where I live, that is not a crime.
I agree, but replacing a diverse range of suppliers with a monopoly is not a positive form of disruption in my view
I boycott non-free books and culture. I'm very leery of Amazon, too, but I don't have a policy for them yet.
In either case, consumers get screwed. Either they get screwed like in the 90s, or they get screwed by systems incompatibility and fragmentation.
All in all, this war is moot. Moore's law applied to bandwith, to device computation speed and to software evolution leads to this: http://xkcd.com/1367/
Not really.
If you have massively powerful devices and massively fast connections then you move to a situation where you've still got to address differences between the programming models and and the feature sets on the various devices.
For a web app to have parity with a native app there are still significant technology gaps which need to be closed - offline working (moving in the right direction, still not great), native look, feel and functionality (difficult if you want it to run on multiple device types) and so on. Some of those will close over time, some may not.
But harder to close off - I struggle to see how cross platform will every be much more than lowest common denominator given the consensus required on how to adopt new features as they arrive on phones. Apple launches TouchID, Samsung launch fingerprint scanning. How long before the W3C define a standard for that and the companies adopt it? How much time is that where native developers are at an advantage?
The web is great and web apps will definitely be a bigger part of things going forward, but I think it's simplistic to assume that they'll take over.
As for a present day Microsoft, I don't see that happening. Back then interoperability was a nightmare - if the person I wanted to work with wasn't running the same OS as me I was basically screwed. Right now I can collaborate with someone and generally speaking I don't care what they're running and it really doesn't matter.
The secret is that the utility curve of technology is not flat. For example: when processors ran at 4Mhz, doubling the processor speed to 8Mhz had a much different utility value than when they doubled from 1.5Ghz to 3Ghz.
As such, even if the technology gap doesn't close, ever, the utility values obtained from each technology will close, to the point of indifference.
You can already observe some of this utility curve flattening, if you observe the absence of game changing feature announcements on WWDC and Google I/O.
As it stands, we are limited to only using these lame DOM-based APIs which have been strained far past their origin in hypertext, and only using Javascript, which has been strained far past its design as a way of merely scripting a browser. These contained some good ideas but they're essentially dead. People want apps. So the original intent is warped to fit that demand, and the result is neither fish nor fowl. It's mystery meat.
If the web weren't so crappy, the monopolist would not really have an opportunity. Mobile platforms bring a lot of value because the web is a bad app platform; where you have the choice, keeping HTTP but using other client technologies is the best compromise available. Mobile platform creators had that choice and went with decent languages and more appropriate environments. Where a graphics API can be just a graphics API, and so on for everything else.
We can count on Firefox OS and anything like it to fail to thrive for as long as it is Mozilla against the world, defending the awkward status quo by throwing more lame hacks on the pile and awkwardly bolting on new device APIs to its browser.
Don't tell me that if I can use a decent language and decent APIs rather than Frankenstein's monster, that I am "screwed by systems incompatibility and fragmentation." The web status quo sucks at a technical level and that is why it is threatened by monopolists. Doubling down on the technical suck isn't going to help. If you want a benevolent monoculture to emerge, you aren't going to get it by doubling down on the status quo and waiting until everyone gives up mobile platforms for ideological reasons, or because a cheap phone uses Javascript.
I know you mean that it sucks when viewed from the perspective of an application developer, and I agree with you. However, on a technical merit perspective, the web is much more evolved, and much more a technical feat, than either Android or iOS.
Android and iOS are a reiteration of what has been done cyclically through times, ever since the first OS got written. A set of libraries and associated APIs on top of a constrained set of hardware.
The web is, as an application platform, a set of APIs. That's it. There's no defined hardware, no defined set of libraries. Guess what? Designing the API alone is much more difficult, a lot harder to get right, and much more of a technical feat.
On one side, some libraries got written and then documented. On the other, everything is defined conceptually (well, not really; if done like this it would be really impossible instead of just difficult, but the point stands).
For some apps, I do. Facebook got deleted from my phone when I found it was the consumer of 25% of my daily battery. I now consume Facebook via the browser. Twitter has gone the same route, because their mobile version is way faster than their app. Both live in my home screen, as shortcuts to the web version (i.e. I do use them).
Google for Facebook battery drain, and you'll find out I'm far from alone.
On the other hand smaller battles (like mobile browsers, open maps, open location data etc.) might be won.
Can anyone with some relevant expertise experience comment on this? From a data perspective HERE/Navteq seems as good as if not better than google data in my locale.
I wonder if article is referring to the lack of "add-on" feature parity?
If the author included some reasons why he thought HERE was worse, maybe it could be properly refuted. As it is, it's just my word against his.
Constant re-routing, providing incorrect directions to trails or anything outside city areas, asking me to try out new features while I'm fucking driving and trying to watch the road at the same time. Just awful. I'm willing to try something different simply to punish the Google Maps team which can seem to do nothing but mangle their code base each release.
Similarly: "Without this Google layer you really only have a featurephone". Yes, and without the battery it's basically a shiny brick. Luckily Amazon has been shipping near identical devices, with apps and maps for several years now, so we don't really need to fully explore this fascinating counter-factual.
Car manufacturers don't make new model cars because they "change" something or do something other cars can't. They make new cars because they need something sexier for people to buy so the manufacturer will continue to increase revenue.
The iPhone didn't "change" anything or provide new features. Nokia and Sony Ericsson already had phones with far more advanced functionality years before it came to market. What iPhone provided was a sexier, easier interface. This Amazon phone is just another badly executed new car that puts new technology over the "sexy" factor, which is why you're unimpressed. But it serves a bigger purpose...
> And that leaves people wondering why Amazon bothered.
To hook people on more subscription services like Prime. That's Amazon's entire business model.
The purpose of the Kindle was to incentivize additional book purchases due to the ease [of not having to ship a paper book or carry it around or keep it] and cost [lower than for paper books]. Envious of the green Apple makes on the App store, Amazon wants some of that mobile-market money, and a way to push their own competing "store" (music, books, etc).
Basically, the mobile sector is turning out digital Walmarts where you can get everything you could possibly need, and the retailers are providing mobile devices tailored to their shops. Amazon doesn't want their shop to get ignored, so they provide their own mobile retail interface to beat the incumbent competition.
You just contradicted yourself. The interfaces of those Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones were terrible for many people. People cheered when Steve Jobs talked about how he used them and he wanted to throw them against the wall because they were so annoying to use. That is a change that people felt was worthwhile and it was more than just "sexy"; it was worth getting rid of your "free" or $99 phone and paying $600 for a smart phone for the first time for millions of people. (They weren't originally subsidized.) That's not "no change."