The problems are not technical and they aren't Apple[1], they are structural. The whole reason the App Stores succeeded (past tense) is they enabled developers to make money.
Monetizing the web directly is practically impossible, certainly without resorting to intrusive ads (which are often blocked) and the attention span of people is incredibly short, so they will bounce. In order to survive you need a compelling reason for people to keep coming back and some source of revenue which is not the web site itself.
The fun part is those problems are now almost as true for apps as well, which is why so many of them rely on external realities to get people to install them, before performing a bait and switch. Additionally the rules around App Stores have quietly become far more restrictive in recent years.
This isn't to say the web is technically appropriate either, because it's not. CSS in particular is essentially broken.
[1] I did https://www.luduxia.com/reversi/ partly as an experiment to validate my thoughts about this. iOS Safari was actually one of the easier targets, certainly far easier than Chrome on Android.
> The whole reason the App Stores succeeded (past tense) is they enabled developers to make money.
How will the internet, the biggest money maker in the history of the world, ever enable developers to make money?
> Monetizing the web directly is practically impossible, certainly without resorting to intrusive ads (which are often blocked) and the attention span of people is incredibly short, so they will bounce. In order to survive you need a compelling reason for people to keep coming back and some source of revenue which is not the web site itself.
Subscription fees, ads, etc, basically everything mobile apps do now, too.
I don't think this is snark. It just misses the point.
The App Store has payment infrastructure built into it. Much, much easier to use for a developer and for a user than a different bespoke payment integration for each website.
Frankly, both payment infrastructures (Apple/Google) should be opened up. Heck, I wish there was a way to mandate building standard/open payment infrastructure for the web.
It's not there because platform vendors don't want it. We could have had it decades ago.
I'm not sure this is relevant. Having open infrastructure (whatever that means) doesn't mean that there'll be a seamless one-click purchase option for users; nor a zero-cost integration mechanism for developers.
Open infrastructure was too vague. An open payment standard, like OpenID/OAuth/FIDO.
There should be a standard, distributed payment system, it should be easy to switch providers, and it should be easy to make payments without going through all these proprietary systems.
It won't ever happen because there's nothing to gain for whoever builds it. And it needs to be build by the platform owners, precisely those that don't want it because they have their own payment systems (Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, etc).
Understood. I wouldn't say that OpenID or OAuth are particularly standardised to the point where you can freely switch providers, though. That's where companies such as Auth0 are required, just as Stripe abstracts over different payments APIs.
Monetizing the web directly is practically impossible
You know, there is this concept called subscriptions, and if more businesses would just focus on creating value for their customers, more businesses would get their customers to actually pay them directly vs a massive race-to-the-bottom revenue architecture, such as advertising and get-as-many-eyeballs as possible.
I know it's a novel concept, but I completely removed all advertising from one of my core businesses, and while I lost out on a pretty hefty revenue stream, the goodwill it generated with my customers increased my subscription revenue (read: customers opening their wallets and paying me directly), and it dramatically decreased my time and effort trying to manage the shit-show that is Internet advertising.
In the last 10 years there has been a global explosion in the forms of monetization possible on the web. Subscriptions, transaction fees, donations and just straight up charging people for goods and services is very possible now. It's no longer the case that people bristle at the thought of monetization. Even VC fueled businesses charge money from day 1. It's as though the gospel of Basecamp went mainstream
Monetizing the web directly is practically impossible, certainly without resorting to intrusive ads (which are often blocked) and the attention span of people is incredibly short, so they will bounce. In order to survive you need a compelling reason for people to keep coming back and some source of revenue which is not the web site itself.
The fun part is those problems are now almost as true for apps as well, which is why so many of them rely on external realities to get people to install them, before performing a bait and switch. Additionally the rules around App Stores have quietly become far more restrictive in recent years.
This isn't to say the web is technically appropriate either, because it's not. CSS in particular is essentially broken.
[1] I did https://www.luduxia.com/reversi/ partly as an experiment to validate my thoughts about this. iOS Safari was actually one of the easier targets, certainly far easier than Chrome on Android.