It's important to note that this new ad slot "will allow advertisers to promote their apps across the whole network, rather than in response to specific searches." This is exactly Facebook's game, and the underlying technology they use to target these ads could easily be repurposed for oh, I don't know...a new search engine?
Coincidentally, iOS 13 updated iBeacon in a way that also made it a lot less useful to developers (although there was a clear privacy benefit for users.)
I was doing academic research on this exact topic and Chris' is the only book that I found that breaks down the techniques one at a time this way. This book is nothing short of brilliant.
Right now I code two days a week and do academic/journalistic writing the other three days a week. The work styles are totally different.
With programming, I work at nearly full capacity until I'm almost done with the task, and then get sort of distracted during that last little bit of testing and documenting.
Writing I find far less conducive to a "flow" state though. I alternate pretty much the entire day between 30-60 minute chunks of working and 10-20 minute chunks walking outside or checking HN.
In the rare instances when I have to switch between the two modes, my productivity basically collapses.
Lot of people talking about third-party application development in this thread. It's also worth considering the opposite side of that, data portability. GDPR already requires companies allow users to easily export all their data [1], and if the US did the same it could really help mitigate the network effect social media companies use to hold onto their dominance (i.e. Facebook's properties)
This view of "traditional monopolies" isn't actually that traditional. From the end of the Gilded Age to through the LBJ administration, antitrust law was focused on reducing market concentration, barriers of entry, and anti-competitive behavior. Only in the 60's did Robert Bork and the Chicago School start to chip away at this way of thinking. By the end of the Reagan administration, Bork's idea that a firm is only a monopoly if it reduces consumer welfare (aka raises prices.) [0]
Google and Facebook have taken full advantage of this new definition. They provide their products for free, acquire competitors without a peep from the FCC (Waze, Instagram, WhatsApp), invest heavily in corporate lobbyists, and have the fastest connections by colocating their data centers and building fiber optic cables. How can a new competitor be expected to lay undersea fiber optic cables?
[0] Tim Wu, "The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age", 2018
"Microsoft spent more than a decade, investing tens of billions of dollars and absorbing an astonishing $12.4 billion in cumulative losses, to establish Bing as a credible competitor. It is cheaper and easier to build a manned space program than it is to build a modern search engine."
- Matthew Hindman, "The Internet Trap", 2018 (p. 174)