The Rise of the Mobile Web | Hacker News Reader

The Rise of the Mobile Web

austinhallock.com

The open web is only open if it is accessible by multiple clients. That is the open part.

The point is that web access is diminishing in favor of app-access to services. A point the author of this article also completely fails to see the potential impact of.

Openness is still there in the examples of Kik, Twitter and Facebook as new 'browsers' - though less-so with Twitter and Facebook. With Twitter and Facebook you're limited to starting points of links friends post. With something like Kik, you can access any site just like you would in a traditional browser, but it improves 1) the poor retention mobile web generally has and 2) distribution (sharing links has less friction).

People are using apps instead of the web for certain services because they're easier to find (both initially, and for subsequent uses), easier to use, and more polished. The point is, this is all changing in favor of mobile web. Mobile apps can become just as easy to use and have close to the same level of polish, but more importantly, they can become easier to discover. Flappy Bird was successful because of social media, not discovery directly from the app store - the app store just added more friction.

Retention is the biggest potential point of failure for mobile web, and that's something I think Kik has solved pretty well. There are other examples of good solutions for this (eg Firefox OS), but none of them have enough traction to serve as a good proof-point.

I believe when people refer to "Mobile Web" they're talking about accessing information through browser apps. That doesn't include embedded web views inside of native apps.

Much of what has made the web so successful is that it is an interconnected collection of documents. A CNet article can link to a tweet on Twitter and vice versa. This is impossible in native apps and embedded web views don't change that.

It's possible that native apps can interconnect but the barrier is pretty large. You have fragmentation of proprietary OSes and no open standards (AFAIK) to make this work.

That's what makes this all so sad to me. I'm not quite sure how we've ended up in this situation but the long term outlook is concerning.

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