Opinions expressed by Digital Journal contributors are their own.
In today’s mobile landscape, the duopoly of the Android and iOS app stores seems nearly unshakable. Now more than ever, with vast swaths of the world accessing the internet almost exclusively on smartphones, these two tech giants serve as de facto gatekeepers of relevance on the worldwide web.
In some sense, the two stores function as highly curated and exclusionary search engines — digital cattle ranches to tame the wilds of the mobile web and package each resource into a downloadable unit, fit for consumption on one’s home screen.
Yet when the messaging app Damus, which Jack Dorsey backed following his 2021 departure from Twitter, fell afoul of Apple’s guidelines recently, its team was unceremoniously told that the app would be booted from the iOS App Store in just 14 days. The service had been operating without issue for several months until a seemingly trivial discovery threatened to stop it dead in its tracks. From the perspective of the Damus team, the taming of the mobile web had instead become mere capriciousness.
The issue, in their case, was a difference of opinion regarding in-app purchases; however, there are myriad other rules and regulations in both of the app stores which have continually frustrated developers and prevented users from ever experiencing the countless innovations that have never made it past the gate.
It is within this environment that Cantonica has emerged to organize the mobile web and make it new again. Rather than a sterile, prepackaged app store, Cantonica intelligently scrapes the web to dig up adaptive mobile sites which look and behave exactly like their app store cousins. Besides scraping, it also enables developers and the general public to index these app-like sites by simply submitting a URL, a few screenshots, and a short description. Both the scraped results and user submissions are then presented within an interface roughly analogous to an app store for the mobile web.
First envisioned and developed by LinkedIn engineers Jiawei Zhou and Di Wu, their talent, and the project itself, was acquired by StableCoupons, Inc after the company’s prepaid bulk app, BulkMagic, was initially rejected by both iOS and Android. “The app stores hardly provided any feedback for the rationale behind the rejections and it was entirely up to us on how to remedy the situation,” said StableCoupons’ CEO, Ken Chester.
Although BulkMagic was eventually accepted to both of the app stores, Chester soon realized that his team would continually be at the mercy of the two tech titans with every single language being added to the app — and with BulkMagic beginning to expand overseas, he began to see this as untenable.
With Cantonica now part of the company’s arsenal, Chester also began to build out a mobile web version of BulkMagic in addition to the iOS and Android versions.
For other apps, the paternalistic oversight of the app stores hardly made any sense at all.
“For instance, it boggles the mind that an app as basic as Bano NYC needs to subject itself to multiple layers of scrutiny just to gain a modicum of visibility and legitimacy as a New York City bathroom directory,” Chester said. “Why not simply make it available on an open yet organized mobile web store?”
Chester and his team plan to publicly open up access to Cantonica later this summer. “It’s long past time to break the chains of app store dependency,” he said. “The internet wasn’t intended to exist like this, regardless of one’s screen size.”
