On desktop, the web continues to gain ever-more use. More and more use-cases can be handled in the web (thanks to expanded capabilities) and more time is being spent there (as a fraction of time on device). It's the exact opposite on mobile.
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I went into this in a recent talk: https://vimeo.com/364402896 The mobile web only performs ~adequately for wealthy users. Between that and a decade+ of training users to find experiences in app stores (where the web was excluded; still is on iOS), time spent % is *low and falling*
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Which brings us back to share. How do we think about it? As a last chance to perhaps turn this around and avert ecosystem collapse. It won't matter who "wins" if the web ceases to be a meaningful part of user's lives.
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And yes, it's as bad as "ecosystem collapse" sounds.
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Eventually, if things keep going the way they are, it won't make sense for *anyone* to invest in improving the web. Legacy platforms don't evaporate into this air, of course, but they also stop changing. They stop addressing new needs. They slip out of the relevance loop.
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Some vendors are already investing in their engines at near-starvation levels; in a last-chance scenario, and with enough share, this may prevent any rescue from succeeding.
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There are strategic reasons to keep the web in a box if you're a vertically-integrated hw/sw vendor. The web is not a platform you "own", but it's a necessary bridge. The way you accentuate your OS/HW advantages is to move content away from entrypoints you can't lean on heavily.
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Funding a team to keep the bridge functional and do the occasional OS/HW integration feature (dark mode? svg acceleration? benchmarketing wins to show silicon advantage?) makes sense. But you never, ever want to let that team threaten your app platform leverage. So you starve it.
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...and if you can get away with it, you might even put policies in place to prevent competition from ever threatening the proprietary with the open.
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Replying to @slightlylate @ohunt
So you’re saying that the mobile web is at the risk of collapsing beyond recovery. Isn’t that a very unusual position? Many people complain that the mobile web is (currently) awful, but I don’t recall anyone else questioning its resilience in the grand scheme of things.
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Yes, that's what I believe the data shows. Would be happy to be wrong about all of this; fear I'm not.
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