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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

One thing I keep coming back to with all this “web3” guff: the premise is openness and freedom, right? How does that square with the way the vast majority of people now use the internet: on smartphones controlled by one of two of the biggest companies in the world? This seems to me like a fundamental issue for anything claiming to be “web 3” in a way that “web 2.0” never had to deal with.

A totally open library sounds like a fascinating concept, but Google or Apple are ultimately going to gatekeeper access to it.

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100% agreed. This is why we’re building it for mobile web and not as an AppStore app

…and who controls the mobile web browsers?

Web3 enabled browsers like metamask, coinbase wallet, trust wallet, brave.

Safari and chrome mobile browsers are not compatible with web3 or dapps.

So we’re back to square one: they’re not usable on mobile devices almost everyone uses.

Um…all the web3 mobile browsers I listed are…mobile browsers. So yes the all work on mobile devices that everyone uses.

But not browsers many people use, you have to get them to install and use another browser before the app is even accessible at the most basic level

The goal posts went from a point about big tech controlling the web3 browsers (which they don’t), to web3 browsers not being on mobile (they are), to not many people using them…

I take it your definition of “not many people” to mean less than the number of users that use safari or chrome, so you win.

But the clever thing about web3 browsers is that they are crypto wallets so odds are if you own crypto, then you have have downloaded and use a web3 browser. Browsers like Brave and MetaMask have 10’s of millions of active users, it’s not exactly nothing for web browsers that didn’t exist a year ago.

Brave is chromium, it may have wallet functionality, but they are not "new" or web3 at the core.

Metamask is a browser extension, not a browser.

I think you lost credibility by being to clever at this point

And they’re installed via app stores controlled by Google and Apple, no?

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