In this RedMonk Conversation, senior analyst Kate Holterhoff is joined by Alex Moore, Executive Director of Open Web Advocacy (OWA), to unpack why the web has struggled to compete with native apps on mobile and what regulators are finally doing about it. Moore traces OWA’s origins from frustrated engineers to a global advocacy group. They explore the technical, economic, and competitive implications of blocking web apps on iOS, from developer productivity and install friction to security myths and the future of innovation. The discussion spans WebAssembly, PWAs vs. native apps, and major regulatory efforts like the EU’s Digital Markets Act, the UK’s DMCC, Japan’s Smartphone Act, and the US DOJ case against Apple.

Transcript

Kate Holterhoff (00:14)
Hello and welcome to this RedMonk Conversation. My name is Kate Holterhoff. I’m a senior analyst at RedMonk and I have a very exciting guest today. Alex Moore. He is the executive director of Open Web Advocacy, more often known as OWA. Alex, thank you so much for coming on the MonkCast to chat all things, mobile development with me.

Alex Moore (00:34)
Thanks for inviting us. It’s pleasure to be here.

Kate Holterhoff (00:38)
Awesome. Okay. Well, I am super interested in the history of the OWA. I was actually surprised by how lengthy the Wikipedia page is and, all the good work that you folks are doing. I guess before we start digging into, what’s top of mind right now, can you talk about who the OWA is and what you are advocating for?

Alex Moore (01:01)
So, OWAs was basically formed from a loose group of software engineers who came together to try and fix browser and web app competition on the web. And so our overall aim is just to have fair and effective… competition for browsers and web apps on all platforms. And specifically our main focus is mobile devices because the web is very successful on desktop but it’s kind of being squeezed out on mobile due to anti-competitive behavior of the gatekeepers.

Kate Holterhoff (01:35)
Okay, that makes sense. And talk to me about the history. When was the OWA founded?

Alex Moore (01:40)
So we started in early 2021 and we’d been waiting for features from Apple for about 10 years. The main ones being install prompts for web apps and notifications, which we identified as the biggest blockers for web apps taking off. And we tried very, hard to get Apple to do it. So we were messaging their top engineers. We were petitioning them. We were posting on WWDC saying, we need these features. We can’t produce apps without them.

Safaris got lots of bugs, please, can you get a bigger budget from your VPs? And we ended up, we kept pushing for that and then we just got no, we had made no progress. It basically got stonewalled in terms of features and functionality. And then eventually we’re like, this isn’t working, we better.

form a group and then we did a bunch of random engineers and we got together and we started talking to regulators basically to say look there’s this amazing potential for basically the entire app market and it’s being squeezed out by the gatekeepers. Could you look at intervening? And we started with the UK’s competitions and markets authority. And yeah, we started having meetings with them and then it kind of just snowballed from there.

Kate Holterhoff (03:03)
Okay, so you have mentioned Apple a few times. Why is it that Apple is at the center of this conversation rather than say, you know, the other mobile

Alex Moore (03:13)
Yeah, so the I mean there are issues on the other on on the other operating systems, but they just pale in comparison to the issues on iOS. The main thing is desktop. When you think about desktop software and it’s good to take all the way back to the beginning. When you first had desktop software, you had Mac apps and you had Windows apps and Gradually over time on desktop the web started occupying a greater and greater percentage of people’s time on their computers to the point where over a decade eventually I think it’s now it’s got to 70 % of all usage

on a desktop computer is either in a tab in a web browser or it’s a web app which is wrapped in a native app. Now with mobile, when mobile original… when the smartphones came out and Apple brought out the iPhone, the only apps you could install were web apps. So then the first version. It wasn’t until until think it was iOS 2 that the App Store came out and they started to sell native apps. And along with it changed the distribution model of software rather than, you you can go to a website, you can download the software from anywhere. They were like, right.

you can only get the software from us. We’re gonna charge you 30%. And then what happened was they then paired it with banning all of the other browsers. Now, they did that by having a clause in their app store rules that said 2.5.6, all browsers must use the WebKit framework or WebKit engine.

And what that essentially means is it means, if you imagine say, know, with Mozilla or Chrome or any of the other browsers, you’ve spent the last, you know, 10, 15, you know, up to 10, 15 years building your browser.

And Apple say, you’re not allowed to use that code. You have to build a brand new browser around a component that we have 100 % control over. So they have 100 % control of the viewing area. Now, the problem with that is that they then under invested in Safari very, very significantly to the point where,

Mozilla was far outstripping Safari in features and functionality. And because of the underinvestment, it became full of very major application-breaking bugs. it made it, you you couldn’t build a viable mobile app in Safari. And then there’s no competition. So there’s nobody else pushing them to improve. At the same time,

they’re putting features and functionalities into their native ecosystem, which made it stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger while the web apps got weaker and weaker. And so when a business comes along and they say, right, we’re going to build a web app or we’re going to build a native app, there is no choice. You have to build a native app because if you want the stability. or the functionality or the ease of install, you have to go to native. But it’s all artificial. Now, there are problems on Android as well.

I mean, can, least by Chrome, which is the, I think, got a 90 % share on Android, you can actually install web apps properly. and they can appear as real apps and there’s an easy path to install them. But because they’re not viable on iOS, and iOS has the majority of the wealthy users, if you’re a business, that’s a non-starter. So any business going in is going to go for native for iOS. And if they’ve already gone for native on iOS, they’re very likely going to choose native for Android as well. And so iOS is the primary blocker for getting competitive web apps off the ground.

Kate Holterhoff (07:26)
I just published a piece on WebAssembly, and one of the more humorous comments that I saw about why WebAssembly just isn’t viable right now for lot of developers is the quote, ghost of Steve Jobs. and I like that because when I was on caniuse.com and trying to figure out if Wasm was supported in Safari, it says yes.

But then when I talked to developers, said, no, actually, Promises isn’t, and we need that. And I said, So the research for that actually taught me to be a little more cynical of caniuse.com than I have been historically. But yeah, it seems to completely mirror what you’re telling me right now about the experience of trying to make mobile development work and Apple sort of historically standing in the way of that.

Alex Moore (08:14)
Yeah, from their point of view, it makes complete sense. mean, if you’re Apple, you want apps to work best on your operating system because that’s what gives you the competitive advantage of Android. The threat of web apps for them is enormous because what it means is that web apps are equal on all devices. And so if you build a web app, it’s going to work equally on Android, I mean, without these blockers.

Kate Holterhoff (08:34)
Mm.

Alex Moore (08:41)
and it’s going to work equally on Android as well as iOS. And then that loses their competitive advantage. In addition, there’s no App Store fees. I think they make about 20, I think it’s around $24 billion a year in App Store fees at the moment. But obviously, if it was going via the web. They don’t collect any of that revenue. The other thing it would also allow, it was allow for other competitors. So if you think about other mobile phone ecosystems, you’re pretty much locked into, there’s pretty much iOS and Android.

and it’s not really possible for a third or a fourth or a fifth competitor to come into the market because you need that entire ecosystem set up. If web apps had been allowed to succeed and were the predominant form of apps, any mobile…

anybody could create a mobile device because then you’d have access to the library of apps that you need to be successful. And I’d argue that one of the reasons, say, Windows Phone didn’t take off was because they didn’t have the library of apps. And it was too much of an uphill battle to try and sell each of the developers. You got your iOS app, you got your Android app. Can you now build a Windows app as well?

Kate Holterhoff (09:55)
Okay, and I feel like you’re educating me about the terminology here. I always call them PWA’s and progressive web apps and you’re just calling them web apps. Is there a distinction here that I’m not familiar with?

Alex Moore (10:05)
No, no, mean, they’re kind of interchangeable. We use PWA, well, we refer to them PWAs as well, but at OWA we simplify it to web apps just because we communicate with a lot of different audiences, you know, sort of governments and regulators, and simplifying it down to web apps is just a lot easier because it’s just…

Kate Holterhoff (10:16)
Okay.

Yeah.

Alex Moore (10:29)
Yeah, suppose web apps you could say more includes things like just any app in a browser, any application in a browser doesn’t necessarily have to have offline functionality. Whereas PWAs would deliberately around, it’s more like what features and functionality you’d expect in a mobile app. It works offline, it’s got its own local data storage. It’s installable and having that set of features.

Kate Holterhoff (11:00)
And I just want to respond to what I hear often when I speak to developers who really are cynical about the eventual success of web apps. And they just say that native apps work better. And they sort of dismiss the PWAs as just not being realistic as much as they maybe ideologically agree with all the points that you’re making here. What is your response to folks who are skeptical of PWAs being able to function at the level of native apps?

Alex Moore (11:33)
Yeah, so the way I like to think about it is, at the end of the day, what you’re talking about in terms of the difference between native apps and web apps is, do you really think that web apps do not have the capability of painting to the screen 60 frames a second and doing the kinds of interactions that native apps can do?

At the same ease of use and then that really that’s really what it comes down to it And I haven’t seen any evidence of that so far obviously if you’re talking about things like high-end games You need high-end game framework. So that’s kind of it’s not it’s not Part of the web. It’s more like a third-party company producing the framework that That can facilitate the production of those games, but if you talk about

all of the other apps that we use day to day, there is no reason that the web can’t compete. Now there’s one of the really, there’s a couple of really good examples of software that’s been built in the web, you wouldn’t think previously, wouldn’t have was possible. So a great example is Photoshop. They ported the entirety of

desktop Photoshop into a web browser. if you think of, and it was, and there’s not a rebuild, that’s the original Photoshop code, which they, you know, they redid and wasm and, you know, built an interface for. And if you think, if you can build a software as complicated as Photoshop in the web, then all of the other software, which is arguably significantly more simple,

Is also possible and then in terms of all the other features and functionality. I mean, you know offline storage is solved installation Works great and then so if you think of the the features and functionalities that we’re missing from native Most of them are artificial. They’re just Apple’s and again mainly from Apple’s world, know, they’ve refused to provide an easy installation process and there’s no competition. So there’s nothing pushing them to invest significantly to so that the lowest common denominator across the browsers is at a higher level.

Kate Holterhoff (13:48)
All right, so I like that. I should just push back and say, well, you know, take a look at Photoshop. This is a manufactured argument. They run just as well as a web app than they would as a native app. OK, I like it. And I’m thinking of data. is there data? Have folks run, like, comparisons? Are there benchmarks on this? I mean…

Alex Moore (14:02)
yet on Yeah, obviously there’s a lot of performance tools so you can detect that. the other point that I really like to drive home here is imagine you have to build an app and you’ve got to have a desktop app, an Android app, and an iOS app. And essentially that means for a complex app, you’re to have to have three teams.

Kate Holterhoff (14:15)
Yep.

Mm-hmm.

yeah.

Alex Moore (14:33)
And then you have your product team, then, right, we design a new feature, and then we’re like, okay, now we’re writing it for the iOS version, we’re writing it for the Android version, and we’re writing it for the desktop version, which probably is web anyway. And we have to keep all those features and functionalities in sync, we have to maintain those functionalities, and it’s this absurd level of complexity. Imagine that’s all just one team, full.

Kate Holterhoff (14:55)
Mm-hmm.

Alex Moore (15:00)
all three, you you’ve got just your product team and your web team, the quality of the software would go up because you’re only building, you’re only going have to build one piece of software.

And you suddenly don’t have this complex distribution process where, you know, we’ve done an update now. We have to go and submit it to the app store and wait a couple of days for it to turn up. You just update the code on your server and then every client is already up to the latest version. And if you think about the benefits that would bring to the quality of the software, it’s quite a lot. And not only that, one of the things that

Companies worry about a lot is this you know that the install funnel like how we you know we do and we put an advert up how many users click on the advert you know install our piece of software One of the biggest blockers to that is if you know any delay that you stick in that process Gets users to drop off Native apps are always huge. They’re always like 100 megabytes 150 megabytes

And so when somebody goes to install one of those apps, they have to wait quite a long time before they can actually use the app. Web apps can be installed practically instantly because when you install them… the data for the app can be loaded at a later date. So what it means that for the installation process, can get it down to fractions of a second compared to at least 20, 30 seconds on a…

Kate Holterhoff (16:29)
Mm-hmm.

Alex Moore (16:39)
on a good internet connection before you’ve actually got the app open, which would actually shift heavily in favor of web apps because the people working with these companies doing statistics would be like, we’re getting more installed via the web app funnel than we are through the native app funnel. But again, it’s all blocked via these artificial barriers that that Apple put in place.

Kate Holterhoff (17:05)
Okay, so one of the things that I hear brought up by the folks at Apple pretty often is that having a moat around the app store is a way of ensuring that these apps that users are interacting with are secure. And so I think security is sort of an important issue for us to take on here. So what is the OWAs position on, PWAs as not being secure and the fact that WebKit is a way of ensuring that end users are going to be protected.

Alex Moore (17:33)
Yeah, this is the one they bring up the most. Their argument, the basic argument that they like to put forward is… We can’t allow other browser engines because then we’re not in control of whether they’re secure or not. Now, one of my favorite quotes in relation to this is the UK regulator conducted a very long investigation and they hired external security teams to…

to do the analysis as well. And they wrote, quote, the evidence that we have seen to date does not suggest that there are material differences in the security performance of WebKit and alternative browser engines. And in another report, they wrote, overall, the evidence we have received to date does not suggest the Apple’s WebKit restriction allows for quicker and more effective responses to security threats.

for dedicated browser apps on iOS. So both of those cases, for browsers in general and for web apps, they found no evidence that… doing a better job. In fact, over time, I would actually say Apple has not done a better job. They’ve done a worse job because One of the results of underfunding your browser for so long is bugs. And then bugs is typically what leads to security issues. Now, one of the other things that you have to think about as well is it’s really comparative security. So you have to think, is the security of say,

Apple’s browser, so much better than say, know, Mozilla’s or Chromium, which is, you know, Google and Edge, that it’s so much worse that it’s better not to have any competition in the browser space. And the answer is just, obviously, it’s not worse. mean, you couldn’t honestly say, and Apple couldn’t honestly say that, know, Mozilla is doing such a poor job of security, we can’t allow their browser onto our operating system. And when…

When you look in that perspective, it starts becoming pretty obvious that the reason they’re doing it is not because they care about security, it’s because they care about protecting their monopoly. And in fact, it did allow those other browsers on iOS, it would probably improve security because it would bring competition to iOS, which would force Apple to spend more money on their own browser. And then we’d get less bugs and there would be less problems in Safari.

Kate Holterhoff (20:12)
Yeah, and I did see in The Register article that talks a little bit about the OWA from 2022, there were some actual bugs that Apple it took them what, like 57 days to fix because the release cycle is so much slower than some of the other browsers like Chrome. So yeah, stories like that certainly suggest that security is not necessarily what’s differentiating Apple when it comes to apps and making sure that users are not going to be affected by some of these bugs, right?

Alex Moore (20:44)
Yeah, and the other argument is that Apple likes to put forward is that in terms of web apps is that you know, if we made the installation process easier for web apps, then that would cause security issues as well. We need to go through this vetted app store process, which is a really good one to go on because you have to think with the app store process, what are they actually checking? Because

You’ve got an enormous number of apps coming in every single day. Do you really think that Apple’s got a team of software security professionals going through each line of code to vet whether these apps are secure or not? And the answer is no, because it’s just not possible. mean, you can’t go through that volume of apps and actually check every line of code. In fact, from public reports, we know the App Store reviewers don’t appear to have any sort of software qualifications at all. And so at best what they’re doing is they’re loading the app up, checking some automated tools which could be run on…

everything. good, that can be run, you know, automatically. And there was a great quote from one of the newspapers from Wired and it was, few reviewers have technical backgrounds, the former employee says, and their decisions are often subjective and vary significantly between reviewers. They were expected to work 10 hour work days, five days a week, and during these peak periods it could go up to 12 hours a day. Phil Schiller, who’s an Apple executive, concerns that conditions might be perceived as exploitive similar to a sweatshop environment. And so that’s the conditions under which the App Store is run. Now the other…

Kate Holterhoff (22:24)
wow.

Alex Moore (22:30)
problem is that the native app environments were built relatively quickly and they believe they have the protection of this review process for security. So the entire native environments aren’t protected as well, they’re not sandboxed as well anywhere near like the web. Because you think about the web, you think what are the consequences of any random website being able to say access your banking tab? And I mean, they’re really significant. over the development of the web, everything has been so incredibly hardened to prevent that from happening that…

that it’s very rare that anything can break out from one tab to access another tab. That’s not the same case on Mobile ecosystems have significantly more security flaws because they got developed in a far shorter time and aren’t sandboxed as heavily. And so one of the things with web apps is that because the environment is secure by default, we would actually say it massively increase security rather than decrease security because the security really comes from the platform rather than some review process.

Kate Holterhoff (23:47)
So I am interested in some of the, advocacy work that the OWA has done and sort of laughable in the US because, legislation on, most recently AI at the federal level just, you know, it’s not going to happen. And it seems like maybe in the EU and the UK, things are moving a little bit more quickly. So I am interested specifically in how the UK’s CMA and the EU’s DMA is approaching this question.

Alex Moore (24:19)
Yeah, EU, out first, they brought out the Digital Markets Act, which is a probably the most wide ranging piece of digital legislation that’s ever been written. And they basically have a whole list of dos and don’ts. And it covers a whole bunch of stuff like steering for external payments, alternative app stores, messaging apps, and the ones that…

relevant to us, based to our advocacy work, be they explicitly prevent a ban on browser engines. so in theory, what that means is that in Europe now, you should be allowed to bring your own browser on iOS with your own browser engine. But obviously,

Kate Holterhoff (24:59)
Mm. wow.

Alex Moore (25:11)
In the years since the DMAs coming to force, Apple has put all these sort of artificial roadblocks in the way to try and make it, you know, make it unfeasible for other companies to actually release, to invest the money to build a browser with an alternative browser engine.

On iOS. Now the main thing they’re doing there is they’ve said that in order to release your app in the EU, have to basically ship it as a separate app. You have to get all your customers to go download and load a new app, which in terms of business terms, it’s just too difficult. then, for example, Mozilla said,

Apple was going to try and make it, know, Apple was making it as painful as possible for that process. In the UK, they’ve just come out with the DMCC, which is a new law which basically lets the CMA, the UK’s regulator, can create bespoke codes of conduct for each gatekeeper. So what it lets the CMA do is that

Kate Holterhoff (26:01)
Mm.

Alex Moore (26:24)
They do an investigation, they designate a gatekeeper, then they do an investigation specifically into that gatekeeper, and then they go, right, you now have to do this, this, and this, and this. So unlike the DMA, which is a prescribed list of things that apply to the gatekeepers, and you can just look at the list, the CMA is gonna come along and they’re gonna give specific…

know, codes of conduct for each gatekeeper, which has the advantage of, it can be quite flexible, but has the disadvantage of, you know, until we get to the point of those investigations and the outcomes of those investigations, you don’t quite know exactly what we’re going to get out of the end of it. But the good thing is that the CMA is going to be investigating both browsers and web apps next year, early next year. So we’re hoping that we should see some, good news and it looks very heavily like they’re going to also overturn Apple’s browser engine ban as well.

Kate Holterhoff (27:20)
wow, that is big. OK, well, I’ve already complimented Alex on his photo, it was before Congress, correct? That is on the Wikipedia page for the OWA.

Alex Moore (27:31)
No, it’s not Congress. was a workshop. That was a Digital Markets Act. It was they organized a the the the EU Commission organized. They invited Apple and us and several other parties to basically get in the room together and then discuss the compliance or lack thereof of the Digital Markets Act.

Kate Holterhoff (27:48)
Okay.

Man, and so are you coming in again to the same room to discuss this in the new year?

Alex Moore (28:00)
Yeah, possibly it happens almost, it’s happened, normally they organize one a year. So we normally attend and talk about the progress that’s happened over the previous year and then discuss what things that we’re not seeing implemented.

And it normally gets quite fiery. if you go back through our blogs, there’s quite a lot of videos of asking Apple very direct questions about their non-compliance.

Kate Holterhoff (28:32)
my goodness. Well, I here I’m calling for a new photo for, Wikipedia to demonstrate that you’re still out there fighting the good fight, making sure that we’ve got an open web when it comes to, mobile apps. And that’s, that’s amazing. it looks very official. I’ll say that much. You know, I was impressed.

Alex Moore (28:49)
Thank you.

Kate Holterhoff (28:51)
It’s a very long Wikipedia page. Let me just, state this again. This is, you know, it’s exciting. So talk to me about the Japan Smartphone Act and the US’s DOJ case against Apple. I mean, it sounds like, you know, I’m kind of focusing here on Europe where a lot of this movement seems to be happening, but this is a global movement, correct?

Alex Moore (29:12)
Yeah, so Japan Smartphone Act is for us, it’s a global movement. In fact, we’ve been trying to talk to as many regulators as possible. The Japan Smartphone Act came from

from quite a while ago, the, I think what they called the headquarters for digital market competition, which was a department under the prime minister, started an investigation and they were investigating smartphones. And so we spoke to them and we talked to them about, you know, all the issues we’ve just been speaking about. And they’ve pretty much done the same thing where they’ve out, you know, they’ve now prevented.

Apple from banning browser engines, but along with a whole bunch of different interventions into app stores and steering and similar things that you’d see in the EU’s legislation and the UK’s legislation. the Japan Smartphone Act is about to start in December. So that comes into practice in December. we’re very, very close to that.

The DOJ case, the DOJ Apple case is a really interesting one. Basically the crux of the case is the DOJ is asserting that Apple is essentially making its phones worse for its own customers to suppress competition. And one of the examples of that was

that in their list was they did list Apple’s browser engine ban and its impact on web apps. And there’s a lot of focus on middleware in the case as well, and middleware being platforms that you can use to build interoperable apps on top of which browsers are one case of middleware.

And what we’re hoping with the case is that that will lead to the same prevention of this anti-competitive conduct in the US as well. But unfortunately, you do have to win in every jurisdiction because there’s no global jurisdiction where if you win in one location, that Apple’s then compelled to do it globally.

We just hope that eventually it gets to enough jurisdictions that they give up and they go, all right, game’s up now. We’ll allow competition everywhere. then the web, hopefully then we can actually get to a point where the web can start succeeding on mobile, where previously it’s been squeezed out.

Kate Holterhoff (31:44)
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so we’ve talked a little bit about what the OWA is doing. How can folks become more involved? I suspect you’re not alone in feeling like these are necessary conversations to have. Are there opportunities for folks? You know, a lot of our listeners at RedMonk are going to be developers. Are there ways developers can become more active in the OWA or maybe just uphold practices that you

see as more positive? Are there things consumers can do? I suspect there’s even some folks that have more of a legal bent. how do we move this initiative forward for those, of course, who agree with you?

Alex Moore (32:25)
Well, yeah, this is a global battle. So we have to win in every jurisdiction on the planet to push this forward. We’ve got a great team of volunteers at OWA. obviously, everyone’s got their own jobs and their businesses. But…

We have people that volunteer their time to do all sorts of stuff in terms of advocacy in their particular country. And so quite often there’ll be an investigation in one particular area and then we’ll team up with the people in that country to go talk to their government or regulator. And things like, you know, the entire website is totally built by, the team of volunteers.

terms of getting involved, we’d love for people to come help out. We run a Discord where we hang out every day and we’d love help with individual advocacy in each of those jurisdictions. And also if people want to get involved in more of the…

Regulatory stuff, we also invite that as well. So if people are really passionate about the legal side or writing documents, there’s definitely something with responding to regulators, writing to regulators. It’s something we’d love to get help with. And OWA is a predominant volunteer-run effort. So it’s what we rely on.

Kate Holterhoff (34:02)
All right. And how are you funded, by the way? Is this something where folks can make donations?

Alex Moore (34:08)
Yeah, we do have a donations page. just on our website. So originally the first couple of years we were completely unfunded, but it turned into such a sort of major operation that we had to start trying to do some fundraising. We got a very generous donation from Jack Dorsey’s foundation. And that kept us going for quite a few years. we’re always looking to get more funds because obviously it’s big job. if anyone wants to donate, they can go to our website and visit the donate page and be greatly appreciated.

Kate Holterhoff (34:47)
Okay. And you mentioned the blog. Are there other avenues for outreach? So folks, can certainly join the Discord, sounds like. But I mean, does the OWA have a social media account anywhere?

Alex Moore (35:00)
Yeah, we do. I think we’re pretty much on LinkedIn, Bluesky, X, Mastodon. I think they’re the main ones moving on. And obviously, we’re also contacted via email as well. So if anyone has specific ideas about their particular jurisdiction, they can always reach out to us if they want to get involved, just either join our Discord or send an email or, yeah, hit us up on any of the social media websites that we’re on.

Kate Holterhoff (35:30)
Fantastic. And final, just CTA, like how should we be acting in this current climate, especially for folks who are concerned about these issues?

Alex Moore (35:40)
Well, I think the main thing is not to put up with the status quo, is that these gatekeepers, predominantly Apple, have deprived us of the advantages of the web on mobile. We used to live in an environment where…

We had this direct customer to business relationship and all of the advantages the web has brought us, including how all of those big companies got started in the first place. And then that, and for some reason on mobile devices, that’s been taken away. now we’re forced to go via these gatekeepers to get access to our software. It doesn’t have to be like that.

just as good as what desktop is. It’s just we have to push for it and we have to push regulators to intervene. And if we’re successful, then we could end up with a renaissance of the software market and lead to better quality, cheaper software, which will then lead to significantly more innovation.

And you’ve got to think, innovation doesn’t come from the gatekeepers. It comes from the little tech. And if we lower the barriers of entry and we lower the costs, then things that would have never existed are going to be possible.

because they’re made affordable. And it’s really the sort of vision that we have for the future is one where the web can compete properly and that it provides a universal write once works everywhere platform that just serves everyone without gatekeepers sticking themselves in the middle.

Kate Holterhoff (37:22)
Right on. at RedMonk, we have long extolled the virtues of open source. We talk a lot about licensing. And so I love this chance to discuss the importance of the open web, because I see these conversations as deeply intertwined. And I think it gets to that, I don’t know, I like to call it sort of that anarchic view of software. This is the vision of technology that’s full of tinkerers and folks who just love the ability to share and to not be stuck behind moats or walls where they’re forced to only use apps that are prescribed, that they have the ability to dig in and have that sort of ownership and visibility into what it is that they’re consuming. Because I think

Alex Moore (37:43)
Thank you

Kate Holterhoff (38:09)
more and more, especially on our smartphones, we don’t have visibility into that. And I think things are only getting more opaque as we move towards our AI overlords present, whatever. Yeah. So.

Alex Moore (38:21)
Yes. Yeah, and also the barriers to entry as well. mean, and then you talk about the tinkerers. I mean, if you’re tinkering and you want to produce an app via the web, it’s so simple. Whereas, you you’re tinkering and you have to distribute by all these different app stores. It puts that barrier up significantly higher. And we wouldn’t bring it back to the tinkerers. But that also is what’s important for the businesses as well. I mean, come full circle back to the original vision of the web.

Kate Holterhoff (38:59)
All right. Well, I think that is a good optimistic place for us to end on the tinkerers, my favorite kind of developers. So let me go ahead and wrap up there. have really enjoyed speaking with you, Alex. Again, my name is Kate Holterhoff. I’m a senior analyst at RedMonk. If you enjoyed this conversation, please like, subscribe and review the MonkCast on your podcast platform of choice. If you are watching us on RedMonk’s YouTube channel, please like, subscribe and engage with us in the comments.

Alex Moore on Open Web Advocacy and Why “Innovation Doesn’t Come from the Gatekeepers”

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