Users can still choose not to install native apps. For as long as the web remains free, I’ll happily support newspapers, magazines, YT Premium and Patreon with my dollars, while absolutely not using the apps with ads in them, in favour of using 3 different content blocking extensions in Safari, and Strict privacy mode in Edge with uBlock Origin on desktop.
That said, because ads are inserted by third parties, you can often block ads with DNS and/or VPN. It’s a shame that iOS has never allowed changing the DNS while on mobile networks, though.
Really though, I miss when we were building open standards for content though, like RSS and podcasts.
Feels like a different era of the Internet, as we never saw an open standard take off for ChromeCast/AirPlay2 or the mentioned-on-stage open standards for FaceTime. Even the RIAA is trying to lock down music again by promoting MQA (Tidal) over FLAC (HDtracks, Amazon).
Closest thing to “open” that I can think of recently for content would be HLS streaming, which optionally supports encryption, but is otherwise open to use or implement.
Given recent history, I think it could go either way, but I doubt users will ever fully accept a closed web, so as long as the web provides open alternatives on every platform, we’ll still be in the clear... for now. :)
A lot of them try really hard not to. A reason for the "show desktop-version" setting's popularity. It's really sad that this has to be a thing, and doesen't really remedy the situation, more like a bandaid.
This largely only really true on Android. iOS at least lets you install content blockers that work with Safari as well as any embedded web browsers within apps. The only place I typically see ads on iOS is in free to play games, and in those cases that's usually a pretty good incentive to play something else.
Somehow people will find a way. If we can't have a universal browser, maybe the answer is to make a browser for every web service. We can make custom apps that pretend to be the official ones while interfacing with the company's servers.
Does anyone really have the time and motivation? It seems like so far there aren't any alternative clients (basic web wrappers don't count) for services that need it the most - think WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, etc?
> Does anyone really have the time and motivation?
I don't know if anyone has tried. It's definitely possible, though.
I used to play some of those predatory mobile games. At some point I got sick of their addictive "daily tasks" game design and decided to automate all of it. I intercepted the game's network traffic: it was just JSON. Didn't take long to write software to talk to the server and do the tasks for me.
Any code that's running on the client can be tampered with or replaced. It's probably not going to be easy but it's certainly possible.
> WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram
WhatsApp is already among the best messaging services. It doesn't really do anything that would motivate people to replace it with something better. Having custom software which lacks the remote message deletion feature would be interesting but it would be too much work for too little gain.
I don't use Facebook and Instagram enough to have an opinion.
On the upside, some content of independent authors is largely supported via avenues like Patreon and tips, not ads.
Most of the websites I produce do not have ads on them. I don't make much money, but I do make some and it's better than it used to be. I'm hopeful that there will be more of a trend towards small content producers making enough to survive and we can begin to crowd out the "cancer" that is some of the worst commercialized stuff.
It doesn't have to go away completely. We can just refuse to let it choke everything.
Thank goodness for my pi hole, but unfortunately that only works at my home network! I'm always unpleasantly surprised whenever I leave the safety of 192.168.1.1
