At the recent F8 developer conference Facebook announced App Links an ‘open’ standard that theoretically enables mobile apps to link to one another, making the mobile app world more like the web itself. Unfortunately, even though the announcement came hardly a week ago people are already finding issues with the idea.
In a recent article by Chris Crum posted, on the WebProNews site, early testers are already finding glitches in the system.
That’s not terribly surprising. One can hardly expect a freshly-hatched concept to work perfectly from day one.
But apart from technical glitches there may be deeper issues. Jay Yarow made some good points in his article posted on the Business Insider website.
“Are Apple and Google really going to sit back and let Facebook take over their platforms? Are they really going to let Facebook tell developers to insert code in their apps that circumvents how iOS and Android work?
“Apple is about to introduce iOS 8, the latest version of its mobile software, in June. It’s possible that Apple has come up with its own native solution to the app-linking problem, and it’s possible that it will be added to iOS 8. It’s also possible Apple will change the code in iOS 8, thus making Facebook’s app-linking solution useless.
“Either way, Apple does not like people mucking around with its platform, so we’re skeptical it’s going to let Facebook mess with the functionality of iOS.
“Google is also growing more protective of its open-source platform, Android. And if you think Google is going to let Facebook become the Google of mobile, you’re nuts. Google is holding its developers conference at the end of June. We wouldn’t be shocked to see Google add app linking of its own.”
It seems like everyone is trying to link everything to every other thing all under one virtual roof. Unfortunately there are lots of roofs out there and – surprise, surprise – no one wants to share. Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and others have all gone out of their way to break each other’s products, block each others sites and steal each other’s ideas all in an effort to establish monopolies (or at least a substantial slices of the market). They’ve been doing it for years and there is no reason to think they are going to stop now.
