The Appstore killed the Website Star

I was recently trying to buy a train ticket using a Web platform which shall remain nameless for obvious reasons. I have been using the site for years to buy train tickets in advance, and while it costs marginally more than buying it directly from the providers, it was still one of the few websites where you could buy tickets from different platforms. Notice I said websites, there are tons of ticket sellers and aggregator apps, even Uber has gotten in on the act.

But the website wasn’t working properly. I kept getting error messages even after logging out, and these would persist across browsers and devices. So I phoned the provider, explained the problem, and the customer support person kindly informed me that I should be using their app instead.

“But I don’t want to use the app, I prefer using the Web!.”

I could hear the sigh from the other end, probably they were looking across the cubicles to their colleagues. “Another clueless idiot!”

“I am sorry, but there’s nothing I can do to help.”

So that was that. I will never use the service again. But this got me thinking about how we lost the Web to apps, and what a poorer world that has become as a result. Sure, it is possible that I am just too set in my ways to accept the realities of the modern world, but I honestly think that the Web of old was a superior product, and that we have been condemned to accept an inferior product in the name of data gathering, centralisation, and sub-par products with high customer retention.

It is difficult now to think of the pre-app era, but the Web was a truly beautiful thing. Blogs, websites, search engines that gave you actual search results, discussion forums tailored for the Web, early social media. Now it is all apps and unusable websites filled with cookie banners and pop-ups. There has been a concerted effort to kill the Web as we know it from all camps, and soon we will have to add age verification and jump through all sorts of other hoops just to access any service.

Welcome to the Web.

But the biggest culprit of the slow demise of the Web as we knew it has been the rise of the app economy. The first thing most large commercial websites will do when you try to access them on a mobile device is to open up a notification encouraging you to install their app. Why stay on the scary open Web when you can be viewing the same content on their safe walled garden? So people switched, and kept on switching until the Web on mobile is practically an extinct creature. 60% of all Web traffic comes from mobile devices, but people are using apps and not the browser on their phones, and 88% of all time spent on the phone is on apps and not on the Web. Sure, that includes games and all sorts of other applications, but the reality is that the old Web is a dying environment.

Add to that the fact that websites have become ugly behemoths filled with cookie banners and pop-ups, and you will see that the move to apps makes a lot of sense. The advantage of the app for developers is evident: higher retention, more control, and most importantly, higher capability of gathering user data that can then be resold to the highest bidder.

The consequences of this shift are far more profound than mere inconvenience. As the open Web recedes, we are witnessing the slow death of digital serendipity, that peculiar joy of stumbling across unexpected information or communities whilst wandering through hyperlinks. Apps create isolated silos of content, algorithmically curated and commercially optimised. This fragmentation erodes the decentralised nature of information access that characterised the early Web. Knowledge and connections are increasingly mediated through corporate gatekeepers, each with their own agenda and business model predicated not on serving users but on extracting value from them, and this is usually achieved through the mining of every bit of data that can be obtained from them. “If you are not paying for the product, you are the product”, and all that.

Perhaps most concerning is what this means for future generations who will never know the Web as it was. The concept of a universally accessible, relatively decentralised information commons is becoming alien. Instead, we’re raising digital citizens whose understanding of the online world is shaped entirely through the lens of commercial applications, with all the surveillance capitalism that entails. The Web (that glorious, messy, occasionally frustrating but fundamentally open creation) is being replaced by a series of sleek, convenient gardens. And the truly worrying part? Most users are walking into these cells voluntarily, surrendering freedom for convenience with scarcely a backward glance at what’s being lost in the bargain.

This model has also become extremely centralised, and as many people will know from my previous writing on the subject, that road leads to darker paths.

Personally I have made a vow on this website to remain a last bastion of the old Web. No cookie banners. No pop-ups. No ads. An RSS feed. Just clean content. But this is a dying model that can only be sustained by the fact that I’m bloody stubborn. I have been told so many times that I too should abandon this experiment and move to a subscription-based newsletter. Come join the walled garden! It’s sunny in here! We have a private pool and the water is warm.

Apps can be convenient however, as we spend most of our time on our phones. But give me an old-fashioned website any day. An elegant weapon for a more civilised age.