| This is both right and wrong. The COVID contact tracing framework from Apple and Google is just a framework for using background features of the phone. There’s currently a fight with some governments (UK and France) over whether this will be mandatory or not. The UK NHS have figured out a way to run low energy Bluetooth background activity without this framework and are going their own way. This might actually mark a turning point in relationships with these tech companies: if Apple/Google insist on enforcing government activities through their framework, those governments probably will stop being so hands off with regulations of the various App Stores and phones. We will see. Stepping back, this is not about mandating apps against user demand, it’s just that the open web has not kept up with user demand for a richer experience both client-side (beyond HTML) and server-side (beyond HTTP and closed data). Really, it’s a longer conversation, but I’d say that the technological and economic failure of the Semantic Web is largely why there is widespread server-side centralization (ala Facebook or Twitter), and the failure of the HTML standards (and innovation!) process has led to the explosion of JavaScript use as a market blowoff valve, with native apps being the culmination of this market demand for richer experiences. The open web is still at the core of all of this: the URL, MIME, HTTP, etc. are the glue that holds this haphazard global networked device world together. The open web is not dead. It is stagnant. It’s ASCII, or SCSI, or PCI, or any number of boring decades old layers buried in our systems. It’s a matter for someone to decide to find ways to invert the economic incentives towards centralization back into the decentralization we were seeing back in the mid-oughts with RSS, Atom, etc. We hit a technological wall (the semantic web) and didn’t have the investment to climb it. We got a new type of computer (the smartphone) and couldn't get past HTML’s history of being a PC-focused UX. So we all jumped onto the easier answers: Facebook and native mobile apps. That doesn’t mean it’s the end of history. Some entrepreneur has to figure out the business and technical models to get decentralization, open data, and rich hypermedia back as a priority. |