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"Apple made a fateful decision that mobile-phone internet should be app-centric, not browser/website centric. Then Android copied their mistake."

Many interesting things in this article, but this is one particular gripe I have about today's Internet. I will go to so much unnecessary trouble just to avoid using somebody's app.

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#IndieWeb #Enshittification #Web3 #SocialMedia #Blog

in reply to Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them)

Apple didn't make that decision, they tried the browser thing, they initially wanted developers to make web apps instead of native apps, but people really, really didn't want that, to the point of making Cydia because Apple wouldn't budge. They eventually learned their lesson.
in reply to Mikołaj Hołysz

@miki huh, well in that case, the customer was very very wrong on that one, at least from the perspective of creating a healthy Internet in the future
in reply to Mikołaj Hołysz

@miki Apple didn’t release (or, one might say *they withheld*) browser APIs that we needed to make useful web apps. It’s better now, but there is still too much friction. Apple and the App Store won, users and developers lost.

I agree with everything in the article. 💯

in reply to Quinn Comendant

@com @miki Well, the initial mistake was when all the greedy consumer ISPs caused the Internet to go from IP (the protocol) -centric to Web-centric, effectively blocking all other protocols and services.

From that point, did it really matter whether it is web browsers or bespoke apps that dominate? Everything has to be shoehorned into TCP streams formatted as HTTP traffic, regardless of whether it is effective or not. We the users have already lost and have a subpar experience.

in reply to ticho

@ticho @com I think the mistake doesn't just lay with "greedy consumer ISPs", a lot of it was caused by opening up the internet to bad actors, the exhaustion of IPV4 space, an increased focus on privacy and the move to portable, battery-powered devices.

End-to-end connectivity with no firewall is the opposite of what users want because of security, static IPs are bad for privacy and impossible when people constantly switch between WiFi and cellular, and it's a terrible idea to allow unrestricted connectivity if you care about battery life.

in reply to Mikołaj Hołysz

@miki @com Most of that could be solved or mitigated, see e.g. MPTCP (Multipath TCP) for solving reliance on unchanging static IPs.