The web is an everything app, and despite capture by incumbents it is still the most open platform we have and it is not illiberal. The reason for that is open standards that are not owned by anyone. We need open identity standards and open payment standards so we can have an everything web that is liberal. But governments have to allow those things to happen. Right now their legislation favors the incumbent monopolies
Philosophically, an OS is a virtual computer meant to be shared among programs (usually an open-ended set of programs, and usually regulating how they interact). You could say the web is not that because it's a distributed system instead of a virtual computer, so the browser makes a better match.
I guess an everything app would be different in that its maker probably goes like "Open-ended set of programs? Who cares, you nerd, I'm just gonna make deals."
As originally defined, an OS is a set of functionalities offered to user-programs for accessing hardware, memory and similar things at a higher level - in it's original intent, an OS was passive. A browser originally also had the intent of being just a receiver/displayer of the information the user requested. Of course, browsers have indeed become more likes OSes as web pages have become like programs.
Of course, mobile OSes and OSes in general have become active and oriented to filtering input as well as generating inputs. This creep is everywhere - MS Windows displaying adds and flogging it's "app store" is one notably noxious example.
It's all a matter of control, in my opinion. I'd say that iOS is practically an everything app, but Android is not. ChromeOS may be borderline, because of the hoops one has to jump through to side-load apps.
If anything the mobile browser situation is much worse.
On one major platform, there is Chrome by default (so even bigger market share issues). People can install other browsers, but far fewer do than even on desktop. For those that do, most use the Play Store which has some conflict of interest concerns.
On the other platform it's even worse. The only option is Safari and the conflict of interest is fully realized because other browsers aren't even allowed on the App Store
Check the sales figures. The Pixel line is a very minor player, especially worldwide. The biggest vendors are Samsung, Xiami, Oppo, Vivo and Huawei. All have their own browsers. The Pixel line has 2% market share in NA and less worldwide.
Chrome dominates because it's better. People install it.
> The only option is Safari and the conflict of interest is fully realized because other browsers aren't even allowed on the App Store.
This is such a persistent myth on HN - I think I read it at least once a week - usually on one of the many alternative browsers, plenty of which are available on the AppStore.
WebKit is the building block of browsers on iOS, but there are an extremely varied selection of browsers using it.
It is sad that we have 2 generations of people believing that falsehood
HTTP literally runs on the application layer, as do email, IRC , gopher and all the old internet. Nowhere in the word "Application" is it implied that some CEO controls what porn people can view.
The term "app" today implies something controlled by a single company. Whatever the "application layer" might have meant in days of yore, the term now derives from the "app store" and not other earlier usages. That's how language works. (and I'm old to remember those usages in the 90s and they were technical/unusual compared "something the user runs" even back then, jeesh).
maybe that's how programmers, entrepreneurs and VCs call it, but most people i know said an app is a program they run on their phone/computer. I really don't get follow the "controlled by a company" part
> But governments have to allow those things to happen.
I very much doubt that. Hell, I think the government would be all-for open payment standards as long as they're dollar-based and conform to tax legislation. The real roadblocks are the current protocol-holders like Apple and Google - their ability to profit off these technologies leave them in direct opposition to what you consider progress. And if iOS/Android doesn't adopt your open standards, you can forget about the general public adopting it.
> the government would be all-for open payment standards
The caveat to that is to have regulated players the gov can control up to a point. Basically official banks.
Since the dawn of commerce governing entities have made critical efforts to regulate circulating money, there's no reason our current govs would allow that aspect to get out of their hand without a fight (that's basically why Facebook's crypto effort got canned)
> Hell, I think the government would be all-for open payment standards as long as they're dollar-based and conform to tax legislation.
The ones that are in favor of that already have open payment systems running (a lot do). If your country does not have one of those nowadays, it's because it's not important for the government.
Or you're going by what they say, not what they do.
Donations to wikileaks getting shutdown by payment providers under government pressure because they didn't like the journalism coming out of it exposing their wrong doings, donations to any inconvenient cause.
Governmnets are A-OK with outsourcing the police, secret services, public order etc to Google and Apple. It's cheap for them and easy , and nobody complaints. It shouldn't be any of those
no, it wouldn't. the government wants to be able to freeze and seize and track money too. this is why it doesn't like crypto, or facebucks, or e-gold etc. because the government always wants control. so the next generation of digital payments will be made to run off fedwire (not shitting on it specifically, it's not a bad idea by itself) and later some CBDC.
next time the canadians have a civil disobedience problem they will not have to go to a bank to freeze money. they will just do it directly.
No, a global network of computers and programs is not an App. No single entity owns or operates it, and the few layers of the platform that do have dominance of it are very content neutral (TLS, DNS).
One app that controls banking, P2P communications and mass media, with little to no competition, is a threat that should be protected against by law, if necessary.
I, always [and still], believe that the web is the most open platform, but a while ago, I hit this [1], entitled "Gatekeepers: These tech firms control what’s allowed online". Only then did I start questioning my assumptions. I mean, while it is still the most open platform, the question I raised was "How far is it open?"
that people have used to create closed systems that act as if there is nothing outside of its walls. if you drew a map of the "internet" so that closed systems (apps) with their walls are cities and everything else is unexplored areas marked with "here be dragons", then you'd see there's a lot more land mass outside of those closed systems.
in principle, you can sidestep them, because they are gatekeepers only to their own garden, so the web is still in principle open, and it's one of the few systems that are still open. But if you do something they dont like or something they will shut you out. Or if you do something governments dont like, they will compell them to shut you out. This is the problem, our democracies are still supposed to be liberal. It will take political effort to change that very bad habit
This is 2022. We can't pretend our governmnets can be tech illiterate anymore, and we should not be allowing it
There's Akamai, Fastly, Cloudflare, AWS and Googles CDNs and what else? To be able to serve an everything app to enough people for it to be relevant, the web platform, whilst clearly having a lot more choice than mobile or PC platforms, is not necessarily the panacea of liberty.
Open standards tend to lag behind innovation for a variety of reasons. If there's a point of increased capture, I'm guessing the time between introducing an "everything app" and open standards would be the capture window. That might be something to be concerned about, though I think we can only hypothesize what momentary capture to that degree would do.
It's also worth pointing out, to the contrary, that unlike China the US markets are highly fractionalized. Some companies have tried to homogenize certain parts of the market, like Plaid, Stripe, etc but their homogenization is generally small when you look at the wider landscape. That's to say, to build an everything app and not start from scratch you'd have to buy many companies worth in the hundreds of millions and billions in order to build the conglomerate that could even shade this idea as "maybe possible".
