The Weekly: The Web with no Apps

… also in this edition of The Weekly: cool looking legos and a Waymo spotted in the wild.

I have been thinking a lot about websites and web apps. What makes a website distinct from a web app? How do you define a web app, or a website? Are they necessarily different? I think these questions are important because they have to do with content, commerce and economies on the World Wide Web and the internet generally.

Thinking about such questions helps me understand why the news industry struggled when the internet took off. Or what happens to digital content creation and commerce when everything is funneled through instant messaging apps, with a chat-like interface and an AI-bot acting as your concierge. Moreover, it helps me think about the role that software developers play in all this.

But as I have been ruminating on web apps and websites, I stumbled onto an interesting thought exercise: what happens to the web if it stopped being a platform for distributing software apps?

I am specifically interested in a world where it no longer makes sense to open a browser tab to open an app, because you can otherwise access it as an iOS or Android app on your mobile phone. Imagine not needing to, or wanting to, open gmail.com or amazon.com to read your email, or to buy something online. And instead carrying out such activities on dedicated iOS or Android apps for any of those services.

To be clear, the internet — as a massive, globally distributed computer network that connects people, organizations and societies — would still exist. To tease out the difference between the web and the internet, consider that when you watch Youtube videos on the YouTube mobile app, you are not opening a web browser to type, “w”, “w”, “w”, “dot”, “y”, “o”, “u”, “t”, “u”, “b”, “e”, “dot”, “c”, “o”, “m”, “enter” … to get a list of videos to watch. Instead, you just open the mobile app, and YT makes those network requests for you — over the internet — to present a curated list of videos for you to watch. But on the web browser, the act of typing out those three Ws means that you are accessing Youtube over the World Wide Web.

What remains on the Web if software developers do not find it useful to distribute their apps over the World Wide Web? In such a world, why would we need the World Wide Web any longer? Why build a website anymore, if not for software app development? What remains?

Wikipedia would stick around. Personal websites and blogs will also remain, I think — I am not publishing an app on the App Store for Winter Rant. I would expect most news websites to remain, like the Times of India, The Guardian, The Verge, The BBC, or The Wired. Although, I am not entirely sure about news sites: the NYTimes arguably works better as an iPhone app with all of its games, and paywalls than it does as a website. Generally, anything on the Web that does not get distributed through any other means would probably remain.

I cannot think of anything else that will remain if we stopped using the Web for app distribution. I am sure I am missing something(s). In many ways, we will go back to a time when the Web was mostly a large collection of interconnected documents. It occurs to me that in such a world, websites might be a little less interactive and focus a lot more on the content that they host. We might still have search engines on the Web, or websites like craigslist.org that might offer an index into those pages and documents — to enable website discovery.

Would the content in such websites be any better or worse than what they are today? Unclear. Would the websites be more connected to each other, or would they live in silos? Unclear. I do think we would still have a variety of media formats … so websites would be able to host images and videos. But would livestreams make sense? Perhaps not? Would we see more podcasts, or recorded audio on the Web? Unclear — consider that podcasts as we know/understand them today as a category of content, have appeared and evolved more within the confines of non-web podcast apps. I am hard pressed to think of a time when I listened to a podcast in my web browser.

In the coming weeks, I will probably list all the different reasons why the open web might cease to exist as a meaningful way to distribute apps, at least in a way that makes economic and financial sense. But even if such a world does not come to pass, I think it remains fascinating to think about it — partly because it exposes how warped the Web has become in its role as a software app distributor.

Life is for Living: Lego Edition

My toddler is getting increasingly creative with his legos. It has gotten to the point where he takes both my wife and I by surprise. So I figured that I would share some of his lego builds. I am happy to concede that they might be no more ordinary than any other lego creation; but I guess I am just a proud dad

This is a giraffe.He attached a dump stuck and a bulldozer to create a bulldozer train. Notice the figurines guarding the bulldozer In his own words, “That’s a monster truck!”

Fascinating me: Waymo

I recently spotted a couple of Waymo driverless cabs ferrying passengers around, on real streets with real traffic. Also, a colleague at work, who recently hailed and rode in one such driverless Waymo, was describing their experience to me.

On the one hand, Waymo makes me realize that we are truly living in the future. The progress in the space of driverless cars has been years in the making, even decades. It takes real feats of technical skill and business discipline to pull off what Waymo is pulling off.

But on the other hand, it makes me wonder how scalable driverless tech is outside the urban or suburban parts of North America and Europe. Can such cars really navigate the organic and chaotic roadways of India or the rugged outback of Australia?

Here is a better question: what problems are driverless cars solving? Who is asking for this technology aside from a few billionaire CEOs in Silicon Valley? A few weeks ago, I argued that driverless cars are a solution to the problem of labor shortages, which may not apply outside a limited set of economies in the world. Regardless, it will interesting to see how this tech stack plays out over the next decade.

Waymo driverless taxi, spotted on a real street with live traffic. Edited the photo lightly to smudge away the car’s number plate and any other numeric identifiers.