Cargo cults and progressive web app stores

People are seeing that native app platforms have some feature and are then asking for the exact same feature for the web. Instead they should be asking about the job to be done and the benefits users or developers see from a given feature. For example app stores :

• give an obvious place to find apps that have particular functionality (try searching for "games that don't need wifi" in the Play Store). 
• give developers an obvious place to find large numbers of users. 
• give developers a structured mechanism for exposing the features of their app so that users can filter the set of available apps for apps that have those features. 
• give users an obvious place to review apps. 
• give developers an obvious place to accrue reputation for their apps. 
• give platform vendors a place to assert policies that drive developer behaviour.
• give every app on a platform a canonical URL ( for example here are iOS and Android URLs for the same game).

Do you remember how painful native mobile apps were (for users and developers) before the popularity of app stores?

— Adewale Oshineye (@ade_oshineye) June 27, 2016

It's easy to forget that app stores emerged as a response to the difficulties of dealing with carriers to get your content 'on deck', getting your apps preinstalled and the extremely closed nature of that ecosystem. However that's not the job to be done on today's web. Instead what we need is:

• a plurality of voices and projects pushing the web forwards. 
• a mechanism where submitting a PWA is as easy as providing a URL therefore anyone can do it.
• a mechanism where web sites and web apps don't have to provide anything proprietary in order to have a chance of being featured.
• to build upon the lessons learned from Mozilla's Firefox Marketplace and Chrome's Web Store.
• something that feels like it's part of the hypertextual web of links rather than a poor copy of native app stores.

Instead of 'cargo culting' the app stores we should be asking what web-centric solutions to the problem would look like. For me that means lots of competing and opinionated PWA directories rather than one central PWA Store or even a popular search engine.

All curation grows until it requires search. All search grows until it requires curation.

— Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) December 18, 2015

The Social Stack: what’s in and what’s out at the various layers

I wrote this back in late 2010 from August to November. This was around the time of the first and only OpenWebFoo so I was trying to think through the stack of specifications, protocols and standards that would have let us build a federated social web.

I've ensured that all the links still work as of June 2016 but apart from that this represents what I believed all those years ago. I'm posting it here because I want to remember the past. At the same time it's a marker of the end of that particular phase of my life.

Today I can clearly see the connection between

• Scott Rosenberg's thoughts about the 'web parenthesis'
• the painfully slow evolution of my thinking about the intrinsic and predictive value of openness
• the techocratic web we rejected
• the closing of the 'browser parenthesis'

At the time I remember pointing out the incongruity of a closed event about the open and social web. In hindsight I should have been asking questions:

• Who isn't represented in this room?
• Why is that?
• What will be the consequences?

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