Oct 18, 2026 · 43 min · 10 segments
The app boom was never just about convenience. It was about control, pricing, tracking, and keeping you locked inside someone else's ecosystem - and Richard Paris and Alex break down exactly how that…
Yes, so I think the app is obviously something that came around in the mobile internet days.
The internet is the physical network essentially that connects all these things together.
And there's some protocols that run on top of that, that we don't need to talk too much about, but they let computers find and talk to each other, et cetera.
Uh, and early on in the internet, there was a real battle behind, you know, sort of between different things as just a, which would become the popular one, which would become the way of finding and accessing information from this mess of computers that we were starting to interconnect.
And the winner ended up being the web, you know, the HTTP colon slash slash thing we all know, which is you can find a page here.
And that page is written in a language where you can have text that's marked up and looks different, you know, to have, you know, titles and body text and bold and italic and stuff.
And you can have images and importantly, links to other things on that network.
So that was kind of then the first real way that people started creating and sharing stuff on those networks.
Before then, people did chat to each other and talk and interact and largely on like command line type bulletin boards and all sorts of things that weren't very mainstream, right? It was very rare for people to have access and then to spend the time to like grind through all of this stuff to get to a prompt where you could type and people would see it and they'd respond.
Um, so the browser was really the thing that took that set of possibilities and made it something real that people wanted.
You could click on a link and you could get a news website or you could get information about something, a recipe, uh, you know, ancestry.com was an early thing, right? You could find out about your relatives and those sorts of things.
You had a whole lot of different ways that people threw up of like, you didn't have to learn how to write the code.
You could use these different tools and make web pages, total mess, totally fun, totally, you know, formative.
There's certainly no way you'd want to like put your credit card on the internet, that kind of stuff.
Um, and then what happened, I think is along with a bunch of things, we got network capable devices in our hands.
And again, there were early on, there were things like WAP and edge that let you do simple messaging or that would give you like.
We had a menu and you could click one of three options, you know, in this sort of horrible text and never took off.
Yes, so I think the app is obviously something that came around in the mobile internet days.
The internet is the physical network essentially that connects all these things together.
And there's some protocols that run on top of that, that we don't need to talk too much about, but they let computers find and talk to each other, et cetera.
Uh, and early on in the internet, there was a real battle behind, you know, sort of between different things as just a, which would become the popular one, which would become the way of finding and accessing information from this mess of computers that we were starting to interconnect.
And the winner ended up being the web, you know, the HTTP colon slash slash thing we all know, which is you can find a page here.
And that page is written in a language where you can have text that's marked up and looks different, you know, to have, you know, titles and body text and bold and italic and stuff.
And you can have images and importantly, links to other things on that network.
So that was kind of then the first real way that people started creating and sharing stuff on those networks.
Before then, people did chat to each other and talk and interact and largely on like command line type bulletin boards and all sorts of things that weren't very mainstream, right? It was very rare for people to have access and then to spend the time to like grind through all of this stuff to get to a prompt where you could type and people would see it and they'd respond.
Um, so the browser was really the thing that took that set of possibilities and made it something real that people wanted.
You could click on a link and you could get a news website or you could get information about something, a recipe, uh, you know, ancestry.com was an early thing, right? You could find out about your relatives and those sorts of things.
You had a whole lot of different ways that people threw up of like, you didn't have to learn how to write the code.
You could use these different tools and make web pages, total mess, totally fun, totally, you know, formative.
There's certainly no way you'd want to like put your credit card on the internet, that kind of stuff.
Um, and then what happened, I think is along with a bunch of things, we got network capable devices in our hands.
And again, there were early on, there were things like WAP and edge that let you do simple messaging or that would give you like.
We had a menu and you could click one of three options, you know, in this sort of horrible text and never took off.
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