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by xg15 4023 days ago
To take Google as an example: 92% market share in Europe in 2014 [1], 81% of the global market for smartphones (Android) [2] - 96% if you also add the single relevant competitor iOS. None of this is technically centralisation. (And won't ever be, as you could always "decentralize" the web by running your own personal search engine on your home box. As long as someone is using it, google doesn't have 100% market share.) However, it doesn't make much of a difference when you want to develop an app that doesn't get accepted into the iOS or Android app store.

But all if this is obviously beside the point that the OP made. Even if you don't want to develop a search engine or a phone app, you still have to tie your users to a central "cloud" service and web site so you can get discovered by google. That's a huge disincentive for p2p services.

[1] http://uk.businessinsider.com/heres-how-dominant-google-is-i... [2] http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS25450615

1 comments

That's a great argument for how dominant Google is in the smartphone OS category, but that doesn't really say anything for whether the web is centralized. Even with 100% market penetration, there are people that opt to not use Google's included apps (such as Facebook and their messenger app).