"When I built out..." Saw that coming.
Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol
31–40 of 135 posts
Re: Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol
#32This is far too naive. User Experience drives everything. If your open protocol is the best thing since sliced bread but it's too complicated for the audience who should be consuming it? It will die and an application with great user experience will take its place.
While I love open protocols and will use them as much as possible, at the end of the day I'm still going to do whatever it is that provides my users with the best user experience.
Re: Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their use model is specifically on mobile devices, and it is certainly true that many sites run absolutely abysmally on smartphones/tablets. While these devices are powerful, they're still weak compared to most of our desktop machines. Flipboard spent an enormous amount of effort making a rendering to canvas platform, humorously to allow an "open" option aside from their app (which makes the complaint about it in the…
> I suspect they did a lot of analysis I heard the same "argument" when Facebook went from HTML to native. Personally, I never attribute to expertise what adequately can be explained by stupidity.
And they're still native. Most users find it a much better experience, and the general experience with the wrapped browser Facebook app was horrendous. I'm not quite sure what your point is.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/13/facebook-android-faster/
After Facebook went native, LinkedIn did some "why we went with HTML5" thing...and then not long after they went native.
You mentioned in another comment that you need to see a list that has troubles on your Nexus 4. I find it difficult to believe you use the web much on the device with such a claim -- I regularly use a Nexus 4, 5, 7 (2013), and I regularly encounter horrendous websites where the site is so grotesquely overloaded that scroll requests are acted on literally a second+ later.
I love the web. I endlessly evangelize the web. But it has serious, profound problems that its biggest champions had to completely work around or avoid altogether.
Re: Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol
#34The iOS 8 extension model could improve support for open standards. Some active iOS apps already support open standards:
WebDAV: GoodReader, Notebooks (Alfons Schmid), OmniFocus, Textastic, TouchDraw, Transmit (includes extension)
CalDAV: 2Do
Other recommendations?
Re: Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Native apps and open standards are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, there are ways to make the data exportable both on the app side and cloud side. The reason companies tend to go for their own protocols is mostly greed. "Because why should I support RSS if I can't monetize it?". That's basically exploiting the common good without giving anything back.
I don't think it's fair to describe that as greed. The fact that a business can't monetise a service it provides is a bad thing; if Twitter for example provided access to everything over an RSS feed, the first thing you'd see would be applications that simply stripped or refused to display advertising etc. I don't see why it 'exploits the common good' to want to charge or monetise a service you provide.
Huh, access to Twitter's API is one of the reasons that Twitter took off, then they started locking that down, adding restrictions meant to destroy alternative clients, because advertising.
To me this is a breach of trust - i.e. the underdogs are all about openness, they're growing based on the goodwill of the early adopters, then once they get big, they forget about openness. Personally I couldn't give a damn about Twitter's need to monetize, they should have thought about that since the beginning, before promising things they couldn't deliver and growing based on the generated trust.
Twitter is not alone in this, there are many other offenders, including Apple and Google. And they should really pay attention to what happened in the past, because once you piss off a significant portion of the industry, you can only go downhill from there. Companies like Microsoft can testify for that and oh look, they are the underdogs again.
Re: Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol
#36Perhaps a bit naive - these companies that start by embracing open standards then pull back from them are just pulling a classic bait-and-switch, with a bit of freeriding off open-source efforts thrown in. They bootstrap their user base and arrive to market quickly by using tools built by others. Then once they grow and gain market and mind share, they can start closing themselves off, walling the garden. And it's ju…
Here's an idea: there should be a maximum number N of employees a company can have. This enforces companies to think about the greater good, because if you're in a company that is split because of size, you might end up in a different company. Also, a maximum on the number of employees stimulates the "modularity" of the market: large conglomerates with internal markets will not be possible anymore. I'm not sure of al…
How would you even start to define a term like "the greater good" in a way that a law like this could event begin to make sense?
Re: Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol
#37So we should never create anything new, then?
That's clearly not what the author is saying. You can easily create something new while embracing standards. You can open your app up to existing standard means of consumption like RSS, email, SMS, etc.
The problem is that you can't make (as much) money using standard means of consumption. Why would a company charge for access via a standard protocol when there is much more money to be made by walling up the garden and blasting advertisements at the inhabitants.
And sadly making money is the purpose of 99% of the companies out there.
Re: Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol
#38Perhaps a bit naive - these companies that start by embracing open standards then pull back from them are just pulling a classic bait-and-switch, with a bit of freeriding off open-source efforts thrown in. They bootstrap their user base and arrive to market quickly by using tools built by others. Then once they grow and gain market and mind share, they can start closing themselves off, walling the garden. And it's ju…
Here's an idea: there should be a maximum number N of employees a company can have. This enforces companies to think about the greater good, because if you're in a company that is split because of size, you might end up in a different company. Also, a maximum on the number of employees stimulates the "modularity" of the market: large conglomerates with internal markets will not be possible anymore. I'm not sure of al…
I think the obvious repercussion is that business will do everything possible to avoid this threshold, whatever it may be, up to and including cannibalizing their margins. N=500, we have 499 people, do we hire one more or find a way to automate that new need or other jobs, even if it costs more than a human would?
Re: Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I suspect they did a lot of analysis I heard the same "argument" when Facebook went from HTML to native. Personally, I never attribute to expertise what adequately can be explained by stupidity.
And they're still native. Most users find it a much better experience, and the general experience with the wrapped browser Facebook app was horrendous. I'm not quite sure what your point is. http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/13/facebook-android-faster/ After Facebook went native, LinkedIn did some "why we went with HTML5" thing...and then not long after they went native. You mentioned in another comment that you need to…
> You mentioned in another comment that you need to see a list that has troubles on your Nexus 4
I said "minimal example". As Linus Torvalds puts it: Words are cheap, show me code.
Re: Your App Is Not Better than an Open Protocol
#40I think the question is - better for who? Clearly for many businesses, walled gardens, avoiding "openness", works. That might be because they use it to create an artificial moat to protect their business (arguably LinkedIn here), or because it's the best way to serve their customers (Steve Jobs' argument, not saying I agree). For customers, if the best experience is gained through a native app, then a native app make…
As much as the tech world loves to hate Apple, walled gardens are a huge part of why their stuff 'just works'.
Suppose you want an app to play videos. If your app uses a custom format no problem. If you support an open standard, the file might not, it might require more processing power than you have, it's probably for a different screen resolution, it...
In the end tech people are willing to trade stuff breaking occasionally for flexibility, but most people flip out when stuff breaks.
PS: I think you can break it down as do you want a VCR to show a movie to your friends, or a VCR that gives you an excuse to tinker.