[ucaetano]

You can do all of that, just download the apk. What you seem to want is that app stores should be forced to accept any apps?

The rest is just saudosistic nostalgia. There wasn't mass access to the internet, you're just missing the times when a small elite had access to the internet.

Consumers are far better now than they were.

[wolco]

There was open access to the internet when aol started giving away cd-roms. Rich and poor, educated and less educated roamed different sites often clashing.

The interest wasn't massive because things were not super easy. Phones bridged the gap. Fast forward to today you have less choice but bigger buy buttons.

[ucaetano]

> rich and poor

You seem to have a mental image of the internet that doesn't correspond to reality. Poor didn't have access, they couldn't afford a computer, much less an internet plan.

Step out of the Hacker News bubble for a bit.

[tkxxx7]

> Poor didn't have access, they couldn't afford a computer, much less an internet plan. Step out of the Hacker News bubble for a bit.

I was very, very poor. So were most of the kids I grew up with. Most of us couldn't afford new computers; that's true. So we bought old ones. My father - tears in his eyes - lugged in something ancient that he'd picked up for $50, having no idea how to use it but hoping that putting it in front me would do me some good. AOL had been mailing everyone in town (Detroit). Some kids got PCs from the nearby churches, some got them from the school (others still only ever used them in school). We collected and hoarded the access disks, and would go ringing each others' phones or knocking down doors to share websites we'd found. Imagine my embarrassment when I realized the AOL search results page was not the entire internet, and that I could click on any text with a blue outline.

> doesn't correspond to reality

I know there are people who managed (or didn't..) to grow up poorer than I did. But even poverty is a spectrum.

[ucaetano]

Very poor where? In the US?

The "very poor" in the US are rich in most of the developing world.

[tkxxx7]

I am aware of this, anticipated this response from you (as you’ve repeated in this thread), and addressed it at the end of the comment you’re replying to. I do not believe that a global perspective diminishes the argument in any way.

[ucaetano]

Oh, it does. Only 5% of the global population had access to the internet in 2000.

If that doesn't qualify it as a product only available to the elites, I don't know what will...

[giantsloth]

The implication of “Consumers are far better now than they were” is that they are better, because of the App Store. This is false, completely illogical, and a straw man argument (as no one suggest users of tech have it worse in 2019 then 2005). Consumers are better off now, because technology has gotten better, not because App Stores have made things better. App Stores have actively caused harm to the consumers through lock in and through a compression of imagination amongst end users of how much better things could be.

You’re also factually incorrect about “a small elite had access to the internet”. That may have been true in the 80s, but by 2000 usage was at 50% and climbed to 75% by 2010. I mean the dot com boom was predicated on wide user adoption, so I don’t even know why you would even think that stat made inuitive sense.

https://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/

[ucaetano]

> The implication of “Consumers are far better now than they were” is that they are better, because of the App Store. This is false, completely illogical, and a straw man argument (as no one suggest users of tech have it worse in 2019 then 2005).

No, it isn't false. Buying and/or installing an app today is orders of magnitude easier, safer and cheaper than 2005.

You clearly don't like it, and you probably are part of the little elite that had access to the internet before the general public did.

You can still do online everything that you used to in 2005, nothing was removed.

> That may have been true in the 80s, but by 2000 usage was at 50% and climbed to 75% by 2010.

Sorry the break the news to you, but the US isn't the world.

Maybe you should step out of the hacker news bubble for a minute.