{"id":258704,"date":"2014-11-17T17:41:00","date_gmt":"2014-11-17T22:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=258704"},"modified":"2024-01-25T18:00:08","modified_gmt":"2024-01-25T23:00:08","slug":"is-the-web-dying-killed-off-by-mobile-apps-its-complicated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2014\/11\/17\/is-the-web-dying-killed-off-by-mobile-apps-its-complicated\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the web dying, killed off by mobile apps? It\u2019s complicated"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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As more and more apps become multibillion-dollar businesses \u2014 from WhatsApp and Instagram to SnapChat and Slack \u2014 it\u2019s tempting to see them as replacing the web, or taking over from it. This helps explain the periodic outbreak of articles about how \u201cthe web is dying,\u201d\u00a0like the one Christopher Mims wrote<\/a>\u00a0recently in the\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/em>. But the truth is that, as is often the case when someone says a certain kind of behavior is dying, it\u2019s a lot more complicated than such headlines suggest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his piece, Mims repeats many of the same arguments we\u2019ve heard before about how apps have come to dominate our activity as mobile usage has grown. Instead of using web browsers, we go to task-specific apps, and these are in many cases \u201cwalled gardens\u201d that benefit a single corporation and don\u2019t play well with others \u2014 either in terms of the data they collect or in terms of links to other sites:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201dEverything about apps feels like a win for users \u2014 they are faster and easier to use than what came before. But underneath all that convenience is something sinister: the end of the very openness that allowed Internet companies to grow into some of the most powerful or important companies of the 21st century.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u201cweb is dying\u201d meme has been around since at least 2010, when Wired<\/em> magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson wrote a feature<\/a> entitled The Web is Dead: Long Live the Internet<\/em>, which talked about the rise of apps for services like Facebook, Twitter, Pandora and Netflix. It warned about the move from \u201cthe wide-open Web to semi-closed platforms\u201d and called the web \u201can adolescent phase subsidized by industrial giants.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The web pie is growing<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

There were a number of problems with the Wired<\/em> story, however \u2014 including the fact that the chart it used<\/a> contrasted the growth of video traffic with the decline of \u201cweb\u201d traffic, even though most of that video traffic was coming from websites and web-based services like YouTube, Hulu and Netflix. But the phenomenon it was describing was definitely a real thing, and in fact has only accelerated with the growth of apps like Instagram and WhatsApp, which don\u2019t even have traditional websites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Zach Seward at Quartz notes<\/a>, the Mims piece makes a common mistake by implying that the size of the web pie is finite \u2014 in other words, that mobile apps are stealing market share or user attention from the open web or the traditional browser, and therefore the web is dying. But the size of the web pie is arguably still growing rapidly, which suggests that apps are stealing attention from other things, including various kinds of offline activity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also, a number of people \u2014 including tech analyst Ben Thompson \u2014 have pointed out that<\/a> a huge proportion of the time spent with mobile apps is devoted either to games or to various forms of instant messaging. Since neither of those things has ever relied that much on the web (or at least on the desktop browser), they aren\u2019t really a conclusive sign that the web is being killed off by apps. As Thompson put it in a guest post<\/a> at WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg\u2019s blog earlier this year:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201dThe more interesting juxtaposition raised by Flurry\u2019s numbers is not apps versus web, but games and social versus everything else. YouTube and other entertainment apps form a solid percentage of what is left (8%), but the remainder is a mishmash of utilities, productivity, the aforementioned news, and, of course the web.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But one of the biggest flaws with the \u201cweb is dying\u201d argument is that it assumes that apps themselves don\u2019t drive more traffic to the open web \u2014 which they clearly do. Social-networking apps like Twitter and Facebook in particular, which consume a huge proportion of the mobile app time of many users, are at least in part about sharing links to content, and while many of these apps open links in their own in-app browsers, that still counts as web traffic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rise of silos<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

One of the concerns that Mims mentions<\/a>, which Wired<\/em> also hinted at in its cover story, is that the rise of apps is dangerous because they are \u201cwalled gardens\u201d both in design and philosophy, and therefore they are a potential threat to the open web. The web\u2019s creator, Sir Tim Berners-Lee raised similar concerns in a piece he wrote<\/a> for Scientific American<\/em> in 2010, in which he described the web as being \u201ccritical to free speech\u201d and a civil society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That said, it\u2019s worth pointing out that Lee\u2019s criticisms \u2014 which are very valid \u2014 weren\u2019t about apps per se, but about the desire on the part of companies like Apple and Facebook to control both the experience on their platforms and access to the data that they collect from users. This isn\u2019t something specific to apps: Facebook behaves exactly the same way on its website. The app is just another way of accomplishing the same goal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I tried to point out in a response to<\/a> the Wired<\/em> piece four years ago, apps make sense for certain kinds of behavior, and likely always will \u2014 whether it\u2019s games, chat-style discussion, sharing photos, or searching for maps and directions. In many ways, the desktop browser-based web was never really much good for those things anyway. But that doesn\u2019t mean the web is dead, or dying. As Thompson put it<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201dThere is no question that apps are here to stay, and are a superior interaction model for some uses. But the web is like water: it fills in all the gaps between things like gaming and social with exactly what any one particular user wants.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m certainly not arguing with the idea that the open web needs defending, or that we should be aware of the efforts of large corporations to force increasing amounts of activity and content into their silos \u2014 that is definitely an issue with Facebook in particular, and with others. But to blame all of that on apps is short-sighted, I think. Apps are just a symptom.<\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As more and more apps become multibillion-dollar businesses \u2014 from WhatsApp and Instagram to SnapChat and Slack \u2014 it\u2019s tempting to see them as replacing the web, or taking over from it. This helps explain the periodic outbreak of articles about how \u201cthe web is dying,\u201d\u00a0like the one Christopher Mims wrote\u00a0recently in the\u00a0Wall Street Journal. … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Is the web dying, killed off by mobile apps? It\u2019s complicated”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":true,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-258704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gigaom"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258704"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258704\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258718,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258704\/revisions\/258718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}