Why apps are not the future
I hear it everywhere. The web is dead, apps are the future. — I heard it first on the cover of Wired Magazine in March 1997 and again in August 2010. I was so impressed I added it to my blogroll, as a reminder to all that you're reading a dead medium.
Context & Ripple Effects
Dave Winer's argument lands in the middle of an unusually crowded apps-versus-web debate. The wave of obituary-writing for practically everything in August 2010 set the stage, and techno.blog's December 2010 piece captured the counter-position — that native apps really are better, while conceding the web retains an escape hatch. Scobleizer had already framed the stakes historically, asking whether 2011 rhymes with 1994 for Apple, Twitter, Facebook, and the Web.
First-order effects
- Winer's post directly challenges Wired Magazine's framing — he notes the magazine declared the web dead in March 1997 and again in August 2010, using his own blogroll as a standing rebuttal to the claim.
- Developers and publishers weighing app-store distribution against the open web get a prominent voice arguing the trade-off is cyclical hype rather than settled fact.
Second-order effects
- The recurring death-of-the-web narrative forces every platform player — Apple most visibly through its iPhone app ecosystem — to keep justifying closed distribution against the web's zero-gatekeeping alternative.
- Bloggers and commentators inherit a ready-made template: each new 'web is dead' cover story can now be answered by pointing at the previous one.
Third-order effects
- If Winer's cycle holds, the industry should treat medium-death pronouncements as marketing beats rather than analysis — the real question stays whether app-store gatekeepers or the open web capture more value over time.
The trend: Claims that the open web is being displaced by closed apps arrive on a rough decade-plus cadence, each one reigniting the same developer and publisher debate without settling it.