101–110 of 222 posts
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They're popular with people who take the subway. Think about it, you're sitting there for half an hour with no service. An app that pre-downloads all of a newspaper's stories is handy and easy to use.
Most of the time the app does not predownload all of the content in advance though.
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> It's a strategy to dismantle the Web Dismantling the Web isn't anybody's strategy (making money is), but in any case, it's a poor strategy nonetheless. One of the most important things I've learned is that all other things being equal, convenience always wins. A strategy that makes things less convenient for consumers is a losing strategy.
>> It's a strategy to dismantle the Web > Dismantling the Web isn't anybody's strategy ... By "web" I mean the public forum that anyone can access with a standards-compliant browser. And yes, there is such a strategy, and making money is the underlying motive. > A strategy that makes things less convenient for consumers is a losing strategy. Yes, unless consumers have no choice. Consider the present cell phone system…
>For those who may not have understood or thought to ask, “unlocking” is not the same as “jailbreaking.” In a nutshell, jailbreaking involves making it possible for a device to run code either from sources the manufacturer did not intend the device to be able to use or to run code the manufacturer did not intend it to be able to run (though most people talk about Apple IOS devices, Sony, for example, will note that other devices can also be “jailbroken”). Unlocking, however, involves making it possible for a device intended for use on one wireless network to be used on a different network – wireless devices sold by a particular wireless company are generally, but not always, sold programmed so that they can only use that company’s network.
Jailbreaking is still legal. Also
There are a couple of factors that will disrupt the Web architecture. The Web has trained us to build dumb clients and centralize anything of value on the server, at a huge cost and never enough trust. We can safely predict today that light-weight protocols, mediated by the mobile OS (and its Platform) will directly challenge the Web architecture, precisely because we can leverage the platform trust model. That evolution is extremely profound. For instance, apps running on your device can securely and privately share information without requiring a complex temporal integration involving a 3rd party service (such as Google AdSense). The information is produced and consumed on the device or the device of a related end-user. What happens on your device can now stay on your device. Just to be clear, and to show how disruptive that architecture is, the primary key of your private data becomes your phone, not your identity. Merchants no longer need to identify you. They can’t care less about YOU, they just care to know some information about you. The problem with the Web Architecture was that the only way to do that was to associate PII to a primary key on a server and hence merchants needed to identify you to track your every move (and they shamelessly did). The second factor is just as profound: the very open nature of the Web is driving scale over scope. The Web has successfully nurtured the largest Catalog, the largest Search engine, the largest Auction site, the largest Social Network, but I see this as a negative side effect of the Web architecture because it limits the scope of what people can do. In other words, the scope of what Amazon, Google or Facebook offer is limited by the scale (and hence the revenue) they can achieve. I actually argue that a trust-based neutral Platform will support a more vibrant and diverse ecosystem than a truly open model because in essence a Web business couples the leve of trust it can achieve with the functionality it can deliver. The Platform decouples the trust from the functionality and it enables much smaller actors to deliver a lot more scenarios while relying on the trust establish by the Platform.
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> It's a strategy to dismantle the Web Dismantling the Web isn't anybody's strategy (making money is), but in any case, it's a poor strategy nonetheless. One of the most important things I've learned is that all other things being equal, convenience always wins. A strategy that makes things less convenient for consumers is a losing strategy.
"Dismantling the Web isn't anybody's strategy". How do you know? Have you read the mind of every human alive?
I think this is mostly misguided trend-following on behalf of product marketing people. "Our competitors have an app, why don't we have an app? Let's make an app." And then, to drive up the app's numbers, put a pop-up on the mobile version of the website with a link to download the app from the app store. Now the marketing genius who came up with this bright idea looks good and deserves a promotion. With any luck the…
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One issue with these permissions is that I don't have a clue what they mean. Does the list of permissions I posted give that app the right to read all my personal data and upload it to one of their servers? Can it delete all my contacts or pictures? Can it make phone calls on my behalf or record my phone calls and upload the audio file to a server?
I know it's not answering your actual point, but I'll answer your specific questions. No, it can't record audio, or make phone calls on your behalf -- both require specific permissions that aren't listed here. It can't access your contacts at all, either, as that requires a specific permission. Pictures are stored on the SD card, so the app could read all your pictures, upload them, then delete them. Newer devices ha…
And I think there should be a notion of "secure/private/encrypted storage". So when I tell an app to store some item there, I can be absolutely certain that no other app will ever be able to access it, regardless of any permissions.
And most apps require permissions that have very little to do with the purpose of the app. Here's what the BBC news reader for Android wants: THIS APPLICATION HAS ACCESS TO THE FOLLOWING: HARDWARE CONTROLS CHANGE YOUR AUDIO SETTINGS Allows the app to modify global audio settings such as volume and which speaker is used for output. NETWORK COMMUNICATION FULL NETWORK ACCESS Allows the app to create network sockets and…
That's why you are better off with Android + Opera and change your user agent for Desktop. It is a not perfect solution but works.
I think this is a valid position in the native/web app debate. Most apps are actually web sites, but they are mistakenly built as computer programs. This is not good engineering. In an ideal world %90 of the apps (anything but utilities, games and graphics applications) would remain as web sites, like they are on PCs. We never install a shopping application to our PCs. Web is the standardized and correct way of prese…
Actually, I do use two news apps on my iPhone (aside from Safari and an RSS reader). They're the BBC, and The Guardian. The BBC app is free, and ad-free, at least in the UK, because it's provided by a public service organization with a non-advertising-based revenue model. (You pay your TV license fee, you get your ad-free app.) The Guardian charges for their iPhone app -- a modest annual fee (or rather more every month if you want the full-fat newspaper on your iPad) but thereafter takes a light touch with the advertising on the iPhone app; it's a headline sampler, and in that respect it's arguably a marketing tool for the newspaper itself.
The common denominator of both these apps is that they don't do the advertising fandango. I think we can see where this is going, can't we? Yes, it's the separate-radio-per-channel model: it's not so much about providing a better service as it is about obtaining a monopoly lock-in on the user's eyeballs while you feed them ads.